Most people who’ve known me for a while are aware that I’m not much of a fan of television — and actually haven’t really watched television in a long, long time. Seeing as how a couple people commented on my watching Lost, I thought it might be worth addressing this. :)
I’m really not sure when exactly I got sick of TV, but my best guess would be sometime around 1992/1993 or so I decided that it just wasn’t worth my time. Most programs didn’t have enough intelligence to keep my interest, and even when I did sit down to watch something, the insipid and insultingly stupid commercials would drive me up the wall. So I quit.
In the intervening years I’ve seen bit and pieces of shows here and there, generally when I’ve been over at friends houses. For the most part, though, I’ve relied mostly on recommendations from friends as to what shows were actually worth watching…and then I’d wait for the DVDs to start coming out. Thanks to DVD, over the last few years I’ve seen (for the first time) all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, the first four seasons of The X-Files, and the first four seasons of The West Wing.
More recently, adding BitTorrent to my repertoire has allowed me to keep up with more recent shows. I first saw Firefly this way, I’ve been keeping up with Battlestar Galactica, Gray’s Anatomy got a few trial weeks, and I’ll soon be watching the first three episodes of Surface to see if it’s worth keeping an eye on.
So I’m not really entirely against television as a whole — in a very general sort of way, yes, I think that TV is primarily a waste of time, and most people (especially children) would be far better off finding better ways to spend their time — but I’m not entirely opposed to finding specific shows that are better written, more intelligent and/or more entertaining than most.
I’d have been quite happy sticking with BitTorrent and watching things at least a day or two behind most of the rest of the world, too, except for two things: Prairie, and Lost.
Prairie, while sharing many of my views on the majority of the shows on TV these days, has never been quite as militant about her anti-TV views as I have been over the past few years. She’s had a few shows that she’s been enjoying keeping up with, with her top three being ER, Desperate Housewives, and Lost. All during last year, she’d occasionally drop tidbits of what was going on in that week’s episode of Lost to me…and then, after getting me to admit that it sounded interesting, and determined to get me hooked, she picked up the Season 1 DVD set when it came out.
We spent the next week powering our way through all of Season 1 — and she won. I’m hooked. So, Wednesday nights are now “Lost Night” for us. Admittedly, I still grit my teeth during most of the commercials (and even the ones that are cute once or twice get extremely grating the twentieth or fiftieth time they show up), but I’m quite enjoying watching the show itself.
So I’m still primarily anti-TV, and am far happier spending my free hours either fiddling with projects on my computer, wandering around town with my camera, or getting together with friends whenever possible. For one hour each Wednesday night, though, I’ll be joining the majority of America in setting back, grabbing some munchies, and keeping up with this week’s adventures on the boob tube.
(Oh, and while I’m just not interested enough in a hospital soap opera to get sucked into ER, she just might get me hooked on Desperate Housewives if I’m not careful. The last two episodes have been pretty entertaining, I must admit….)
I came to college and have found far better things to do with my time than bother with TV. Sure, I have my TV plugged in and hooked up to the cable (free in the dorms) and it is sitting off to the upper-right hand of my screen right now. But I don’t love it like I did. If I want to watch a show, I might make an effort to watch the TV. Usually I either torrent, download or borrow a show from someone else rather than watch TV and commercials. The majority of my TV’s use has been gaming. My apartment is geek central (but just within the bounds of social acceptability) and we have a lot of systems hooked to it. I can’t remember exactly when I last sat down and just let my eyes glaze over watching TV, but it was probably after a really long day at work this summer. And if not then, then a year+ ago. Commercials suck, there’s not enough good programming to keep me around and I can’t stand a lot of things about TV.
As for hospital soap operas…well, I haven’t seen ER for a while, but when I last checked, it was no General Hospital.
I really haven’t seriously watched anything since I was a freshman; sure I had a TV, but it found more use as output for any of my roommates’ various game consoles.
With regards to “Surface”: I wouldn’t bother, but that’s your call.
there’s no problem with having your one TV show as long as you limit it to that one show. I was a militant anti-TV person for the longest time. Then, I studied abroad in the Netherlands, and I watched TV more as a social experiment than anything (I always watched with my roommates, and we watched Dutch shows, Firefly, and Nip/Tuck). Senior year of college, my roommates hooked me on Gilmore Girls. Now, that is my one hour of TV a week. When living with them, we would all sit down and enjoy time together when watching the show. Since we don’t live together anymore, we email afterwards to discuss it. I like this style of TV watching b/c it’s more than just mindless staring.