On TV

Tonight I found myself awake at 1:30 AM watching Farscape on Netflix. It got me to thinking about the growth of television. Specifically televisions evolution as I see it. As a life long TV watcher I think I have a unique perspective. In my opinion if radio is the theater of the mind, then TV is the theater of the mind personified. It has had three acts. The first is Mash, the second is Sex and The City/Arliss, the third is Angel. I will explain each in detail.

Mash: When I was a kid we had a small yellow TV that had a dial and an antenna that required foil. I remember being the designated adjuster for my older sister. We would try to watch A different World and I would adjust while she screamed stay there. I think the TV only had 13 channels. Maybe 14 if you include the random Spanish language channel on 23 or 24. In any case, I was a avid TV watcher. Whenever my mom would go to sleep and tell me to go to bed, I would watch TV. After the fun TV shows like Gilligans Island, usually a western and I love Lucy, and before the Flag Salute and the beeping bars, there was Mash. Mash to me was a horrible show. It was set in a War but you never saw fighting, the opening music was weird (I now know its called "Suicide is Painless".), and the lead character seemed nice, but he was always yelling about something. In a nutshell this show sucked. Yet I tried to tune in every night.

  Sex and the City and Arliss: Cable television changed my life. No longer was I trapped in a box of 13 maybe 14 channels. Cable offered over a hundred channels. My favorite channels were HBO and The Box. HBO at that time for me was a revelation. I thought to myself, this is what TV should look like. I had two HBO shows I would watch religiously. Sex in the City and Arliss. Sex in the City was about exactly what the title expresses. Women having sex with multiple guys in New York. Now consider that this is before the age of internet porn and I was a teenager. Lets just say I enjoyed watching Charlotte. 

Arliss was an awesome show. It was about a sports super agent. They would have a lot of  athletes on and it was very funny. (Fun fact, that was when I discovered Sandra Oh from Greys anatomy. She played Arliss's assistant and the sister of extremely hot 9 ball champion Jennet Lee "The Black Widow".)  In retrospect, I think HBO catered to the fantasies of teenage boys. 

Angel: At this time I was of college age. Websites like Limewire and Bearshare were all the rage. At that point everyone found you can find your favorite TV shows online. My girlfriend now wife, had borrowed a book filled with ripped TV shows from her sister (I don't think we ever returned them). In that book we found the TV show Angel. She wanted to watch Buffy, but me being a movie purest, I can only accept Christy Swanson as Buffy. So, we watched Angel. We were hooked. We spent a week or two shut into her co-op room. We watched every episode. It was a glimpse of what TV will be and set the stage for modern streaming services.

Modern TV viewing is in a state of limbo. We are still stuck between cable and online services. I think eventually the online services will win out. I have dropped my cable provider and now rely on a variety of streaming services. Individuals crave choices. And the whole idea of channels limits choice. Hulu and Netflix bring a wide array of shows to the consumer on demand and still we crave more. To the point were the definition of TV has changed. Viewers feed on small snippets of cat videos on Youtube. The human fascination with TV is part voyeur and part connection. We will create more and more things to watch until the possibilities become infinite. And at that point we will still shut off the TV and exclaim there is nothing to watch.