Viddy Well Little Brother

I have a love-hate relationship with television: I love TV, and I hate myself for it.

I love TV because it’s the best way to turn off your brain for as long as you want it turned off. I hate TV because, in the classic “opiate of the masses” kind of way, one could easily argue that after significant exposure to American Idol, The Biggest Loser, The Apprentice and Deal or No Deal, the mind-numbing effects can easily to seep over into the periods of time not spent drooling in front of a cathode ray tube. Optimally, one should spend less time in front of a glowing television, than not.

Groucho Marx once said, “I find television very educating. Every time someone turns on a set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

I love television because, from a purely sociological point-of-view, it’s changed the world fundamentally in ways that could never have been predicted. Instant information bouncing all over the atmosphere twenty-four hours a day, just waiting to be plucked form the airwaves, and usually at no cost to the consumer. How many people do you know don’t have at least one television in their homes?

I hate television because it reminds me of “the wire” from the Ringworld book series by Larry Niven. In Ringworld, narcotics are a thing of the past, and “the wire,” a powered crown that jacks directly into the cerebral cortex of the human brain, is the “stimulant of choice” for those weak of constitution. The crown directly stimulates the pleasure center of the brain, inducing what is at one point described as “an intense orgasm that lasts for as long as you’re jacked in.” In Ringworld, the streets are littered with people, literally wasting away from malnutrition, rolling in their own feces, with ecstatic smiles across their soiled faces. That’s right, it’s just like Eugene, Oregon.

I hate myself for loving television because it’s so pedestrian and, at heart, I’m just a snob that’s better than everyone else. Then I hate myself a little more for thinking that, because I hate people that ascribe to those types of pop notions of intellectual elitism, like those assholes that think there’s nothing to be learned from anything on television. “I don’t watch television” is like some badge of honor for people that can’t actually accomplish anything else with their time other than to pretend to be smarter than everyone else in the room. As if announcing that you haven’t eaten meat in five years is supposed to make us fall to our knees and wipe your feet with our hair. Well, as Jim Gaffigan says, “I haven’t eaten a banana in a month. Big whoop.”



Certainly, “Three’s Company” isn’t going to help you understand the world any better than you already do, but just try to tell me there’s nothing to be gleaned from Mythbusters, or Bullshit! or The Wire. Not just truth, entertaining truth, just like OTR.

On one hand, I constantly fret about all the books I’ll never be able to read before I die. This anxiety has worsened of late, since the Lafayette Public Library just had their annual book sale, resulting in me purchasing more books than I can read in a year, but that’s neither here not there. As much as we’d like to believe that time spent reading good literature is not deducted from one’s lifespan, I think that there’s a grand delusion that all written word is noble, and all television is plebian.

In his book “Everything Bad is Good For You,” Steven Johnson proposes that the beneficial aspect of television and video games is not the subject matter, but the format itself. As a consumer of “good television” (reality shows, low-brow sitcoms and anything involving Howie Mandell will hence-forth be known as “bad television”) you are required to explicate complex plots and storylines, getting a “cognitive workout” that math problems, chess games and the digestion of quality literature would impart. Johnson postulates, “No one evaluates the benefits of chess based on its storyline or monotonically militaristic subject matter.”



Can the best of modern television drama approach the cultural importance of, say , Shakespeare? With certainty. Take, for example, HBO’s Rome. For my money, there’s no better television. Drama, violence, sex, politics, deception, war, rivalry, anguish and mythology, all of a caliber that can only be appreciated in the context of the ancient world. Compared to Shakespeare’s histories (the third and often neglected category of his works) they prove to be, for all intents and purposes, the very same thing: Political intrigue, dramatic rivalry, forlorn affection, savage violence and sex, all set in the exciting and idealistic periods of ancient human history, when men were men, women were women, and a tooth infection was more likely to kill you than an enemy’s arrow.

At his peak, Shakespeare enjoyed great popularity, but was generally considered by the intellectual elite (yes, they’ve been around that long) to be popular drivel with no real meaning, context or truth: precisely the way your typical intellectual snob would describe prime-time television.

However, while a comparison between The Bard and “Everybody Loves Raymond” might be intellectually feasible, you won’t see it in this forum.

The main reason TV gets such a bad rap (aside from Aaron Spelling) is that it’s so ubiquitously available, and as we all know, something everyone else has, is generally just not worth having. The irony is that the near limitless availability of television programming is the medium’s greatest strength. The ability to reach most people, regardless of age, race, wealth or disposition, with a message, whatever it might be, is the alpha and omega of politics, culture and economics.

“I was born in a house with the televisions always on” goes “Love for Sale” by Talking Heads. It’s worth mentioning that David Byrne meant it as a damnation of the culture in which he was raised, but I see it differently. I was also born in a house with the television always on, and I’m smarter, more culturally literate and, if I do say so myself, a good deal funnier and quicker on the draw that those that weren’t.

Pop culture junkies unite! (except for you, Quentin Tarantino, you keep your seat)

Now, am I advocating raising all future generations “Clockwork Orange” style with pliers on their eyes, forcing them to watch re-runs of Green Acres for days at a time? Not yet, but those parents who refuse their children access to the singularly most popular medium of information and entertainment are denying them the cultural literacy and common ground with others upon which modern society is built. Any perceived advantage a TV-less child might have, which no study has ever confirmed, would far out-weighed by their inability to relate to everyone else, especially me.

And the consequences of a world without me are simply too devastating to imagine.

There is one criticism of television, however, that even I can’t defend. As Tom Robbins says, “There’s no better way to avoid a wonderful night of love-making than to spend it watching television.”


At it’s best, television, like literature, cinema, and “legitimate theatre” (the two words have to spoken aloud in a snooty British accent) is engaging, thought-provoking and at times cathartic. At worst, it’s a waste of time. Just like OTR.