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Entry tags:
- keyne,
- life,
- relationships,
- tv
discovering cable TV
Ellen 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....
Re: What you need now...
Re: What you need now...
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.