discovering cable TV
Apr. 23rd, 2003 04:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
topazEllen came in to the living room late tonight and asked, "What are you watching?"
I'm still not sure, but I think it was the prelims of the Eastern Log-Sawing Competition.
We are discovering the great social experiment that is American cable television. Neither of us has had much exposure to cable TV. Ellen had cable in her youth, but it was pre-MTV, before the era of 500 channels, when "cable" was how people in the sticks got any TV reception at all. I grew up in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where cable TV wasn't available. (Or so my parents told me. They may have been conveniently fibbing.) We did eventually get something called WHT, which was like the bargain basement of cable services -- it was the movie channel that ran all the bombs and B-movies of yesterday, movies like "Bronco Billy" and "Rough Cut." It was horrible. The memory still gives me nightmares.
As adults neither of us have ever spent much time watching TV. In Chicago we always ran home from work to catch "The Simpsons," and we'd pick up "M*A*S*H" at 11 p.m. In the last few years we've picked up a wicked bad "West Wing" habit but have (proudly) successfully avoided getting sucked into anything else, despite earnest attempts by "ER" and "Will & Grace" to occupy our attention.
Now, beyond our wildest dreams, cable Internet has finally come to our town. We signed up right away. I wouldn't have bothered with the cable TV subscription, but Comcast offers TV + Internet service for $5/month less than Internet service alone, and I could not resist. (Something about capturing eyeballs. The poor fools.) The fellow came this morning to hook us up, and now we're hooked.
Since we both are weirdly obsessive about organizing information, I immediately went about writing down the names of all the channels that scrolled by on the TV Guide channel. This information is surely available online somewhere, but wouldn't you know it, I just had to do it by hand. Then we typed up the list and looked up the ones we weren't familiar with. ("What the hell is EWTN?" "Something Catholic." "Okay, how about TNN? What is that, country music?") Then we reorganized the channel list, sorted by category.
Sick, sick, sick.
What was most interesting about it all was that -- ods bodkins -- we actually spent the evening hanging out together sharing an experience. I have come to look down my long pointy nose at TV, considering it entertainment for the brainwashed. We have resisted cable TV mightily. We have wanted not to become zombies to the box. Because, sure as sunset, as soon as our cable was hooked up, we were completely engrossed in a half-hour TLC spot on dwarfism. This is not necessarily how I want to pass my days.
The surprising thing was that it was a more active, personal experience than I expected. After the kids are in bed, we often retreat to our separate offices -- "to check our mail," of course -- and emerge only hours later, pale and drawn, spent of energy and hardly able to drag ourselves to bed. Tonight we sat down in front of the television while we both still had some energy and spent the time talking and laughing together. (Which led to having some really fabulous sex and eating up the leftover Thai food in the fridge. All in all a better night than I've had in a long time.)
It's still the honeymoon period, of course. This NRE thing can't last. Before long we'll be watching reruns of Happy Days, drooling, slackjawed, and wondering where the evenings went. But until then we can enjoy the present....
I'm still not sure, but I think it was the prelims of the Eastern Log-Sawing Competition.
We are discovering the great social experiment that is American cable television. Neither of us has had much exposure to cable TV. Ellen had cable in her youth, but it was pre-MTV, before the era of 500 channels, when "cable" was how people in the sticks got any TV reception at all. I grew up in a neighborhood in Brooklyn where cable TV wasn't available. (Or so my parents told me. They may have been conveniently fibbing.) We did eventually get something called WHT, which was like the bargain basement of cable services -- it was the movie channel that ran all the bombs and B-movies of yesterday, movies like "Bronco Billy" and "Rough Cut." It was horrible. The memory still gives me nightmares.
As adults neither of us have ever spent much time watching TV. In Chicago we always ran home from work to catch "The Simpsons," and we'd pick up "M*A*S*H" at 11 p.m. In the last few years we've picked up a wicked bad "West Wing" habit but have (proudly) successfully avoided getting sucked into anything else, despite earnest attempts by "ER" and "Will & Grace" to occupy our attention.
Now, beyond our wildest dreams, cable Internet has finally come to our town. We signed up right away. I wouldn't have bothered with the cable TV subscription, but Comcast offers TV + Internet service for $5/month less than Internet service alone, and I could not resist. (Something about capturing eyeballs. The poor fools.) The fellow came this morning to hook us up, and now we're hooked.
Since we both are weirdly obsessive about organizing information, I immediately went about writing down the names of all the channels that scrolled by on the TV Guide channel. This information is surely available online somewhere, but wouldn't you know it, I just had to do it by hand. Then we typed up the list and looked up the ones we weren't familiar with. ("What the hell is EWTN?" "Something Catholic." "Okay, how about TNN? What is that, country music?") Then we reorganized the channel list, sorted by category.
Sick, sick, sick.
What was most interesting about it all was that -- ods bodkins -- we actually spent the evening hanging out together sharing an experience. I have come to look down my long pointy nose at TV, considering it entertainment for the brainwashed. We have resisted cable TV mightily. We have wanted not to become zombies to the box. Because, sure as sunset, as soon as our cable was hooked up, we were completely engrossed in a half-hour TLC spot on dwarfism. This is not necessarily how I want to pass my days.
The surprising thing was that it was a more active, personal experience than I expected. After the kids are in bed, we often retreat to our separate offices -- "to check our mail," of course -- and emerge only hours later, pale and drawn, spent of energy and hardly able to drag ourselves to bed. Tonight we sat down in front of the television while we both still had some energy and spent the time talking and laughing together. (Which led to having some really fabulous sex and eating up the leftover Thai food in the fridge. All in all a better night than I've had in a long time.)
It's still the honeymoon period, of course. This NRE thing can't last. Before long we'll be watching reruns of Happy Days, drooling, slackjawed, and wondering where the evenings went. But until then we can enjoy the present....
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So you've got a vroomy connection now?
Date: 2003-04-23 05:12 am (UTC)Re: So you've got a vroomy connection now?
Date: 2003-04-23 10:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-04-23 05:49 am (UTC)I think that calling some medium "entertainment for the brainwashed" is actually the entertainment for the brainwashed. It is all too easy to say that some technology is dehumanizing or stops people from using their brains or stifles creativity or yadda yadda yadda.
A medium - technological or not - is an opportunity for people to share things. What you do with the things you get from the medium is up to you. If you want to consume it as a mindless drone, then do it. If you want it to be a bonding experience, then you can do that, too.
A number of years ago, someone I knew was surprised to find that I watched television on a regular basis - after all, creative, intelligent, thinking people don't do that, do they? I pointed out that in my household, the television was actually part of a social pattern of discussion and interaction. Had they ever seen "Mystery Science Theatre 3000"? Well, no, haven't seen that. "well, its a show about people watching bad movies. The entertainment isn't in the movie, but in the way the viewers react to it". "Oh! What an interesting idea!"
Interesting, creative people find new and interesting things wherever they go.
PS. For some reason, I think there is 6 feet under with your name on it somewhere.
no subject
Date: 2003-04-23 05:53 am (UTC)Ooo yes. David and I just watched season one (out on DVD); totally worth it.
no subject
Date: 2003-04-23 07:11 am (UTC)But I can keep my nose in the air because not only have Bob and I decided not to get cable for this house (cable people act very strangely when you want to disconnect their service, as if not having cable were as uncivilized as not having hot water) (which, come to think of it, we've also done without, albeit involuntarily), we haven't even set up the TV yet. We will have to someday, when our friends get tired of taping West Wing for us.
Sure I can totally see going without cable...
Date: 2003-04-23 12:44 pm (UTC)At the point I'm at now, having a *slow* net connection makes me feel like I've been kicked in the head a few times, and can't think clearly anymore.
How pathetic is that?
no subject
Date: 2003-04-23 11:04 am (UTC)I think there is 6 feet under with your name on it
That's an HBO thing, right? Still no premium cable yet. :-)
no subject
Date: 2003-04-23 07:37 am (UTC)But it does have one redeeming quality.
"The Dukes of Hazzard"
I'd do Daisy, Beau and Luke.
no subject
Date: 2003-04-23 08:20 am (UTC)wow, it scares me to know that i know that much television trivia. *shakes head*
no subject
Date: 2003-04-23 11:07 am (UTC)Why did I ever doubt the wisdom of this in the first place?
no subject
Date: 2003-04-23 08:17 am (UTC)"Now I've got...the stock report in Korean!"
Date: 2003-04-23 09:16 am (UTC)I used to flip around a lot more when I first discovered the wonders of Cam's cable. Now we pretty much limit ourselves to BBCAmerica (Ground Force, Changing Rooms, So Graham Norton, AbFab), TLC (Trading Spaces), SciFi (Stargate SG-1, bad weekend movies), The Weather Channel, and CNN. Oh, we'll watch the occasional documentary on Discovery or Science, the rare movie on IFC, or some videos on one of the many flavours of Viacom, but we actually listen to more cable radio than cable music channels.
What you need now...
Date: 2003-04-23 09:20 am (UTC)Re: What you need now...
Date: 2003-04-23 10:16 am (UTC)Re: What you need now...
Date: 2003-04-23 10:38 am (UTC)Heh. Heh. hehehehehehe... Beware. I'm one of them (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/fashion/20TIVO.html?ex=1051416000&en=a77422bb2a91649e&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE)...
The problem with "just popping a tape into the VCR" is that it's the Wrong Tool. Sure, you can time-shift one or two shows occasionally by doing this, but there's a reason why no one does it: it's error-prone, finicky, a pain to set up, and if you actually want to do it on a regular basis, it requires constant interaction with the machine in order to make sure that you keep the schedules updated, keep blank tapes fed into the machine, and generally spend so much time on the process that it would probably have been easier just to re-arrange your schedule to watch the shows as they were broadcast.
Tivo...changes that, and not just from a mechanical perspective. It stops being a question of "I need to program the VCR to catch this show because I won't be home" and changes it to a question of "Do I feel like catching up on the last two weeks of Buffy, Angel and Six Feet Under tonight, or do I put it off until Sunday afternoon?" When every show is recorded and time-shifted, the entire nature of your interaction with television changes: it works on your schedule, not the other way around.
To me, the big problem with television wasn't that it was a "vast wasteland." There's always been a fair amount of quality entertainment, even honest-to-god art, on TV. The problem was that in order to find the 5% that didn't suck, I had to adjust my life so that I would be in front of the magic box when the good bits were on. Tivo actually fixes that, not once or twice, but permanently.
Me too!
Date: 2003-04-23 09:41 am (UTC)I still watch the same shows I struggled for with the wire.
But now I see I like to watch information and social shows, my family watches the real video. I can't stomach seeing people get hurt over and over, but hey...
And my 15 year old loves Spongebob, who is really a sweet fellow with a great outlook on life. At 15 he could be into much worse!
But I gotta say the best is the Osbournes. What a show. I wanted to live with the Addams family when I was little, now I want to live with them
With my birthday coming up my phrase, by Kelly is " It's MY BURTHDAY( British accent-screaming)
Having watched T V endlessly all my life, not sure why it gets such a bad rap, and reading is good?. Even when those readers are reading People mag and Romance novels.
Its quality, dammit.
Share the remote!
Welcome....
It's not all good, and it can become a timesink of its own, but if you treat it with care, as with any hobby, it can be fun :-)
Farscape! SG-1! 6 Feet Under! Sopranos! yabba yabba yabba!
no subject
Date: 2003-05-05 02:49 pm (UTC)I've similarly had very little exposure to cable TV, and very little exposure to broadcast TV since I was a child. (I watch lots of movies on DVD or VHS, but I think the last time I had the TV playing broadcast programming was the night/morning of the 2000 elections. Oh, I think I turned it on a little bit on September 11th, too, but that day I got most of my news from the net.) However, I've recently discovered the joys or ills of TV programs on DVD -- specifically cartoons. I'd enjoyed the few episodes of The Simpsons that happened to be on when I was at somebody's house, but had never seen very much of it. But it's on DVD! And then I tried South Park. And I just got a set of Futurama on my boss' recommendation, although I haven't watched any of it yet. And I worry about myself, because it occurred to me last night that M*A*S*H was a good show, and it's available on DVD too...
That has the advantage that I don't have to deal with any of the commercials even so far as fast-forwarding through them, and that I can watch what I feel like watching when I feel like watching it. But it's expensive, and the selection isn't great. Makes me understand the appeal of Tivo.
I've vaguely considered getting cable from time to time recently, but my problem is that what I'd most want it for is extremely obscure stuff, like the Biographies of Sixteenth-Century Herbalists channel or live footage from the Ukrainian parliament, and in order to get that, I'd need to pay for the local broadcast channels and the standard movie channels and things like that as well. It's probably just cheaper to buy or rent DVDs from time to time. Especially since that means I don't get hooked on stuff I don't have the time for. :-)
no subject
Date: 2003-05-10 03:58 pm (UTC)The other reason is a belief that nearly all mass culture is, by definition, a waste of time. I can tell myself that this is just a product of my culture, and that other people like their mass culture and interact with it in ways that I shouldn't judge morally, but that still can't make me stop cringing and leaving the room when my roommates turn the tv on. Taste is _hard_ to escape.