Sunday, May 11, 2003 8:51:00 AM Joe Coluccio
Am I the boob, googoo g'joob?
About three weeks ago I made a decision not to watch television. It has been an interesting experiment. Not because, you understand, I am a snob about the déclassé nature of the boob tube. I find people who ban their snooty minds and/or children from viewing have arguments as cogent as people who have found the most convincing new diet and conversations as mind numbing as golfers describing the dog leg just before the sand trap on number sixteen at Alamogordo Pines.

Au contraire --mon semblable,--mon frere-- I was raised in the blue electronic bath of the cathode ray. To me it was mother's milk and other things of that ilk. Perhaps that is the problem. Time for me to wean from the "glass teat".

What then, I ask, am I missing?

Look at what they call the news.
It is at the very least alarmist and certainly slanted to Middle America. Someone once explained to me that the soap opera formula was to immerse a population of upper middle class folk into a vat of lower class problems. It seems to me that news takes a similar tack. It amplifies very small and very tragic situations and places them statistically high in our living rooms so that we can cower and bite our nails to the very nub until the balm of commercial message can be applied. News sells soap as well.

A local newscaster answered when queried, "Well, what is good news? We can't very well report that Joe Doaks didn't get shot last night." The good news to these, what was it, “nattering nabobs" is the commercials. They don't really have any idea, nor do they care to spread the wonders of imagination and good work that occurs daily!
I have my own ghosts to scare me thank you very much!

I can't really comment on network prime time shows. I simply don't watch. There is that tradition of great TV comedy after you strain out the truly boring sit coms with comfortable people doing simple things in an unconvincing manner. I don't need to name the great shows. You know them. I have heard that a network manages a gem on occasion. I just don't have the patience to set aside a period of time to sit and watch. Although technologically adept (I can even set the timer on my VCR), I find myself far too lazy and disinterested to videotape for a later viewing.

Sports. I think TV is excellent for sports and I think it is well done. It is immediate and real. Somewhere along the line my interest waned. The Pirates get me in the spring for about a month. I watch a couple games even learn a new name or two. Alas Dixie Walker and Ralph Kiner or the whole menagerie that The "Gunner" named for the 60's Pirates are part of another time. The new world is about contracts and sports, I am told endlessly, is a "business". Sorry friends, no matter how many employ the litany, sports remains an entertainment. I preferred my players and teams to seem loyal to the city and region, even when they weren't. Shucks betrayed again!

Educational TV can be swell. Sadly it is not only bound by time constraints but defeated by the medium. It cannot give you the depth of a subject; it can provide an emotional response that starts you on a journey of discovery. It is often tainted by the same problem as news. SARS killed a little more than 500 people out of a world population of 6 billion. 0.00000000833%. This is not even a blip on a very finely attuned radar screen. I'm not saying that a story about a new potentially harmful vector in the world isn't something of concern. I am saying that last year it was shark bites. There was more danger in turning on the specials about rampaging marine life. TVs can spontaneously combust, you know. Saw it on America's Most Subtle Videos.

The commercials. Isn't it amazing that these little gems of video and audio aesthetic are the best of TV? And boy do I have a great admiration for the infomercial. It is a commercial that mimics a real television broadcast by interrupting itself with a commercial. This, I swear, is more ingenious than insidious. The brilliance of the whole concept sets both my tongue and my tail to wagging.

Maybe if there were all infomercials all the time I would turn the set back on.
Just when I figured where the yellow went.