 |
|
|
 |
|
We have five TVs at our house. The bad-boy, the rear projection, HD 57-inch Hitachi, owns the living room; the 32-inch Philips is tucked into an armoire in the master bedroom; the 27-inch Sylvania perches on a stand in the guest bedroom; the 20-inch Super Scan does likewise in the den; and the 15-inch LCD Magnavox is nestled into a kitchen counter opening opposite the bar stools where we sit to eat dinner.
Any night that I'm home, I pretty much put the Hitachi through its paces from 5:00 to 10:00. We're on Cox cable, the expanded package of 64 channels plus several additional tiers, including 11 movie channels, 10 specialized sports channels, nine HBO channels, eight MAX channels, eight STRZ channels, and five SHO channels. At our dinner half-hour, we'll switch to the Magnavox, catching NBC news or some kind of ball game, squinting to read the tiny scores trailing at the bottom of the screen. At 10:00 I open the bedroom armoire and fire up the Philips, finishing a ball game or a sit-com rerun before falling asleep over a crossword puzzle. Judy, meanwhile, has the Super Scan going in the den while she does jigsaw puzzles on the computer. The Sylvania gets used when she irons in the guest room.
With all of these TVs and the hours invested in watching them, you're probably thinking that I must be both a huge fan and an addict. Well, yes and no. Often the TV just provides a sense of connectivity and some colorful background radiation, an ersatz source of warmth like the Amish light-bulb fireplace that sits next to it and flames up without crackling or smoking or emitting any scent. Most of the time, no one program is at the center of my attention. I am generally reading or writing or working a puzzle or eating or telephoning while the program is in progress. Or I may be picture-in-picturing. And sometimes I'm napping. Nevertheless, inattentive as I might be, commercials are the bane of my couch potato existence. Of course, I realize how essential they are to the American economy and I concede that occasionally they are amusing or even enlightening. And certainly without them my cable bill would increase exponentially. Yet I resent them both as things in themselves and as things that require a brief focussing of an attention that I have already happily split two or three ways. They force me to grab the remote and surf to my next-most-desired channel. They distract me from my distractions. Not only that, but sometimes I have to hit three or four channels to get past an ad's rocky shoals and into a program's open water. You know what America needs, fellow vidiots? A TV scheduling czar--a genius who could design some sort of chip that would enable TV sets to distinguish between program and commercial/infomercial and allow a viewer to select, using his trusty remote, his top 10 channels of the evening, in priority order, so that the TV would automatically change channels when a commercial came on and keep changing until lighting upon a program, not a commercial. After two minutes, the TV should automatically default to the original channel setting. Of course, the viewer should be able to override the process manually at any time--if you wanted to stay with the newly selected channel, for example. And, at any time, you should be able to hit SEARCH and have the TV go through the channels in your prioritized order, pausing just long enough for you to choose that channel if you wanted it. On a related note, TiVos and DVRs should also be able to make that distinction. Only they should stop themselves at the onset of a commercial and resume recording at its end, thus eliminating the need for tedious, time-consuming, so-called fast-forwardings.
But what's up with this now? Having said that I like a TV's reassuring radiance in the home, I wish to add that I absolutely detest seeing it shine in certain public places. Sports bars, okay. In front of treadmills at fitness centers, sure (provided that the sound is available only with earphones). But in DMV offices, beauty parlors, barber shops, airports, and--yikes!--doctors' offices? No. More and more places have dominating TV screens tuned to generic, bland programs--Regis, Oprah, CNN news--with the volume blasting away. They are every bit as annoying to listen to as a one-sided cell phone conversation. Doctors should not waste money on TVs. They should instead spend it to upgrade their magazine subscriptions, for doctors' offices were positively made for reading magazines. I'm not asking for anything erudite, but I'd like to see current editions of Golf Digest and National Geographic. I'll even settle for up-to-date issues of People and US Weekly (where else am I going to catch up on gossip about the "stars" whose shows I am flitting to and from?). For the sake of common decency, the required elimination of reception room TVs should appear in the first paragraph of any health-care reform bill passed by Congress.
Nothing on TV at home? Doesn't matter. Let it glow, let it glow, let it glow. Anything at all on TV in public spaces? An offensive invasion of privacy and cause of woe, cause of woe, cause of woe.
|
|
|