You and Me and This TV, Part 1

Matt Keating--"You And Me And This TV" (mp3)
Matt Keating--"While We Fiddle" (mp3)


I hardly ever watch TV shows. At least not while the shows are on TV. No, instead, I wait and rent or buy the seasons when they come out as box sets. I'm not sure when this bizarre habit began; I think it may have started as a kind of a defense mechanism against television, which I have seen taking over far too many lives. You see, I could then claim that I never watched television, never served as a slave to it. I don't watch TV; I watch DVDs of TV. Yeesh!

Stupid and expensive as that sounds, there is something to it. It puts you in control. Before the invention of TIVO and its ilk, before Hulu.com and other Internet options for catching up on missed shows, and even now for those who don't have a digital recorder, television dictated when people I know could do things.

I have known grown, sane, intelligent people who confused television with social life. They could not do X on a particular night of the week because L.A. Law was on or The West Wing or 24. The more "critically-acclaimed" the show was, the more justifiable the decision to choose it over human interaction.

Recently, I attended a very fun Seinfeld party, a themed event based, of course, on the hit comedy that ran for 9 or more seasons. I never watched Seinfeld when it was on. I've seen a few episodes in reruns on cable. It's quite a good show and I always enjoy it when it comes on. Although my wife and I had a great time at the party, we were clearly out of our element. We knew absolutely none of the trivia necessary to navigate the party and its activities.

As I think back to the Seinfeld years, I try to reconstruct why I didn't watch it. First was the fact that I didn't have cable. We went without it for years, occasionally jumping back in and then getting disgusted and disconnecting it again. Also, I have this weird quirk that plagues me in most contexts. If something is too popular, too mainstream, I recoil from it. When everyone is watching The Simpsons or South Park, I'm not. Of course, when I plug back into something long after the craze is over, I'll think, Gee, this is pretty good.

But, I'll admit that there was a year or so back in the late 80's, early 90's when getting together with our neighbors and watching Thirtysomething was a very much looked-forward-to social event for a young couple with a baby who didn't get out all that much.

Television can serve us in particular life stages. But I certainly wish my elderly father watched less TV, fewer stock market shows and Fox "News" programs and other segments designed to scare old people, even though I understand that his television keeps him company.

There are many studies about children and television and the potential negative connections between the two. I've kept up with them tangentially. TV might promote violence, TV makes kids hyperactive, TV makes kids into perfect little consumers, TV makes kids docile, TV makes kids want to eat really strange breakfast cereals, TV makes kids believe that Nickelodeon and ABC/Disney comedies are funny.

Finally, the results of my own personal ethnographic study are in and here are my findings: TV makes you boring as shit.

With few exceptions, a night, a season, a year of television gives any of us little more than a few "Hey, did you see..." conversation starters or funny lines or sly insider references that we can drop to knowing comrades who have also wasted their evenings.

So let me throw down the gauntlet: Adults should watch no more than 10 hours of television a week.

There, I said it. That's my rule that I just made up. The time limit is arbitrary, probably generous. If you really think that you have 10 must-see shows every week, you are definitely missing out on doing something better, something more edifying, something more alive. All you need to do is to remind yourself, with each passing year, how much harder it is to push yourself out of a chair or off of a couch that you have been sitting in for several television-filled hours. Ultimately, television will kill us, and, therefore, if we inject ourselves with it, we've got to keep the doses small.

Like most rules I have, I violate that whenever I feel like it.

Next: the greatest television show of all time?

Matt Keating's Killjoy is available at Itunes.