So it’s been almost three weeks (I think) since I last posted anything on this blog.
Can I briefly mention my distaste for the word “blog”? It sounds like something swollen and gelatinous (blob) or wet, smelly, and possibly full of long-preserved dead bodies (bog). And when you precede it with the word “my” as in “my blog” it sounds like you’re referring to your misshapen evil twin, the result of your father’s secret experiment gone awry, or something. “It wasn’t me chasing you that night, Jenny, it was my blog!”
Anyway, I haven’t been writing much in the past few weeks in part because I find it difficult to think about anything other than the election, and so, in order to numb my brain, I have been watching a lot of television.
I get most of my television in the old-fashioned format: broadcast. Sometimes it amazes me that you can just go to the store and buy an antenna that just pulls in entertainment from the air. I’ve heard rumors in the past few years that eventually television will no longer be broadcast through the airwaves, and that everyone will be required to get cable. I’ve never believed those rumors. But I was shocked recently when I read somewhere that something like 80 % of households currently have cable or satellite.
I understand the allure. Whenever I go to my parents’ or my in-laws’ house, I’m amazed at how much decent TV there is to watch. I could get lost in the Discovery channel, for instance. Or the Travel channel. The Comedy channel is getting so much press for things like the Daily Show. And HBO keeps coming out with new programming that wins all kinds of awards.
So my wife, Nancy, and I have started renting cable shows on DVD. Our first foray into the cable for rent market was The Sopranos, which we totally fell in love with (though the first season remains our favorite). From there, we moved onto Curb Your Enthusiasm, another work of genius, the Dave Chappell Show, which we thought was uneven but occasionally hilarious, and Six Feet Under, which I almost wrote off after the first three episodes, but has gotten steadily better.
I am fascinated by this new form of television consumption. I’ve always thought that one of the qualities of a television show is its placement in the schedule. I remember when I was a kid, reruns of sitcoms always played around twilight, and it felt fitting that these shows, which had passed into history, were airing just as the sun was passing into the west. Along the same lines, Saturday morning cartoons were injected with the tangy flavor of weekend freedom. In college, I would gather with friends every weekend to watch the X-Files (first on Friday, then on Sunday), and it became the perfect spring board for our drunken, pseudo-philosophical, paranoid discussions about the world.
But when I watch a TV show on DVD, it’s robbed of all that. I guess, from a cultural standpoint, it’s robbed of its demographic specificity. TV executives choose when to run a program, and they make that choice based on who would likely be watching. When the TV executives get us right, and we participate in the demographic process, there’s something sort of beautiful about it. We feel like we belong. We’re not alone in the world. Watching a TV show on DVD feels like being an anthropologist. “So this is what the natives do for entertainment.”
On Sunday, Nancy and I spent much of our day watching The Office, the brilliant BBC comedy about an office manger who’s obsessed with the idea of being friendly and funny in the eyes of his employees. Nancy and I found it so entertaining, that we watched the whole the first season all at once.
Nancy and I worked in the same office for a while several years ago, and we couldn’t help seeing that office reflected back at us in The Office: the pathetic attempts of employees to entertain themselves, the boarder line psychotic behavior of managers, the obsession with sex, the empty lives. By the end, I had remembered numerous times in my life when I had made jokes that weren’t funny, when I had been in positions of authority and looked like a fool, when I had tried to win over women and fallen on my face. I felt like I was a character on the show.
If we had cable, we might have watched The Office once a week, and gotten a bleakly hilarious half-an-hour at a time of insight into our own experience. Instead, we got a several hour long gulp of that bleakness. We both felt sick afterwards.