Our New Television

'THE CLOSER': BITCHY, BITCHY

He says:

I like to watch The Closer, but this season is neither 1) as much fun, nor 2) as well written as previous seasons. Back in the old days, before Brenda was married, she said, "If I liked being called a bitch to my face, I'd still be married," and it was funny and it said something at the same time. Now Brenda and Fritz have gone the way of too many real-life married couples (many a good relationship has been ruined by marriage). Before they were married they seemed like people it would be fun to spend a little time with, but since they were married, they spend their time bickering, fussing, stepping on each others' toes and jurisdictions and don't seem like they are having any fun at all. I know I'm not. I am not enjoying watching them and wouldn't want to be around them. I started watching the show because I enjoyed the quirkily flawed characters and the snappy dialogue and the way things developed away from the plot (all cop shows have the same plots anyway). Somehow, that has slipped away (the flaws have off-the-shelf ho-hum neuroses and the talk is losing its snap). Rather than interest, the show's writers - and no doubt its star and producer Kyra Sedgewick - have decided to add a strong dose of self-righteous gimmickry with the introduction of Mary McDonnell as the internal affairs captain who always seems to be in Brenda's way and vice versa. The result is not an enlightening examination of the methods and madness of police work (Brenda always stands in the way of that) or even interesting head-butting between two strong women; it is a self-righteous bitch-fest between two wonderful actresses and self-righteous bitching is no fun to watch no matter how good the actresses are. And if The Closer can't do any better than that, they will lose me as a viewer. I would rather watch reruns of Law and Order. I love Law and Order reruns but I never consider watching reruns of The Closer.

BLOODY REMOTE

She says:

After two weeks at the beach on vacation in North Carolina with foreign remotes, non-HD tv, and no HBO, our five remotes, big HD tv, and numerous programs recorded on the DVR box made being back to 100+ degree days in Austin bearable.

What was I thinking writing about the good old days when you could turn the tv on by turning a dial?  A curse was upon us. The tvs in the rental houses did not have dials but a few of the remotes neither turned on the tvs nor allowed for surfing.  Note to summer vacation cottage owners – program the remotes and leave instructions. Personally, I scan the remotes and write directions on the print-out for the house sitter. What good is it to have a tv in every room when none of the remotes work? It was really so bad that our niece and her husband had to figure out how to help us with the remote problems and the solution was that the remote for the living room tv was in the bedroom and vice versa. Maybe the cleaning crew was having a bad day (a previous renter did not leave them any beer or something) and it seemed a funny idea to mix the remotes.

 Walt was so happy to have his big tv back when we got home. I didn’t miss seeing Casey Novak’s facial scars but after two weeks of 27-inch screen and smaller screens, our 40-incher was something else.  Something almost too something else, as in the case of catching up on episodes of True Blood.

I know that vampire and other-worldly sex is supposed to be very sexy, but that pulsing maenad Mary Ann’s orgies were not very sexy and Bill and his maker sloshing in a bed of blood was –  well, for a moment there that 27-inch non-HD tv from the vacation cottage seemed a good idea. I always have to close my eyes during the opening credits when the fox decomposes (end of second time the refrain of the theme song is sung for those of you with bad timing or no idea), but that HD made the blood and sex and sloshing a little too vivid.  Great sex is always messy, sloppy, and wild, and the point could be that vampire and other worldly sex is not very sexy. Sure enough those scenes will be on soon and we can take a poll.

Today, I watched episodes 2-4 of Hung. The premise of the show is repellant - teacher is in need of money (this is news?) and turns to prostitution to make ends meet - but it is really about a jock and his incompetent female pimp who are both idiots where relationships, women and sex are concerned. Plus, neither of them is very sexy – if you believe that sexy is more the person than the exterior.

Since I’m still avoiding work and just back from vacation, I considered watching three episodes of Hung a good use of my Monday afternoon. After all, my horoscope said that rushing around would not show my maturity today. What better way to make the tv and zodiac gods and goddesses happy than to indulge in passive fantasy tv viewing, instead of sinking into the dark side by sharing time with my fellow Americans on Dr. Phil or Divorce Court.

4:54 P.M. - 5:00 P.M.: IT'S AMAZING WHAT YOU CAN LEARN IN SIX MINUTES

She says:

Today is my first true day of vacation and I celebrated by doing all of the chores that had been put off for the past 10 months – by multi-tasking in front of the television. I sorted tax receipts, folded laundry, wrote, and watched the movies Walt would never watch with me, even if he was just being exceptionally sweet and humoring me while he waited in great mental pain for the 10 seconds worth watching. I watched 27 Dresses and Hancock. After Hancock, where I left Will Smith perched like a gargoyle atop a building awaiting the script for Hancock II, it was 4:54 p.m.

Too late for Jeopardy, but time for a quick surf before the news, just enough time to fully understand last season’s Jon and Kate plus 8 and everyone’s favorite new season of Trading Spouses. Both shows are the “reality” kind that make me wanna go and slap somebody, or at least have their children taken away from them. Far, far away.

4:54 p.m.-4:57 p.m.

This episode of Jon and Kate was pre-admission of their failed marriage. Between 5:54 and 4:57 we find J & K standing with the twins on 49th Street in New York City.

Looking confused and each holding a twin by the hand, K asks J if he even knows where they are and is he even awake (even though it was clearly midday).

And everyone is surprised that this marriage was in trouble?

They were taking their very ungrateful, or at the very least very confused, twins to the American Girl store in NYC. It made me wonder how many of the American Girl books these 6-years-old twins had read, but who cares. Clearly J & K don’t mind talking about how difficult Kara or Maddy can be – really they are just ungrateful for this super good birthday gift.

Tabloid news has its limits, so I Googled all sorts of questions about these people and found out this show has been on for five seasons. I really need to slap J & K with more than the back of my hand. All this in three minutes. I hope there is a therapy fund in the works for all those kids.

4:57 p.m.- 4:59 p.m.

The other show, Trading Spouses, had an orthodox Jewish family and some Kentucky hicks trade spouses. Is anyone really that hard up for cash? Of course, the Kentucky mother just knows that these Jewish kids are lacking in the fun department and against the father’s wishes she is planning a boy-girl dance where girls can dance like lesbians - as the rabbi arrives. The Jewish mother has told the loser son of the Kentucky mom that she would have educated him better - just before his granny arrives to tear her a new one. All that in two minutes and this is only Part One! How come we never see the spouses allocate money for the kids to enter therapy?

And these people are my fellow Americans? Mothers and fathers. Please, someone hide the remote.

NEWS FROM MICHAEL JACKSON'S MEMORIAL

He says:

Michael Jackson was half an hour late to his own memorial service. Other than Smokey Robinson reading a letter from Diana Ross and another from Nelson Mandela there was lots of television blah-blah-blah to fill the time (one thing tv is good at, blah-blah-blah). But he finally arrived. And after several hours of being memorialized, including Brooke Shields, who described MJ as "caring, funny, honest and pure" (go figure), I can report that Michael Jackson is still dead. But as Elvis has shown us, there is a real future in being dead.

And lots of people believe Elvis, not Michael, was the king. Remember that Bob Dylan (remember him?) line about "Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain's tower"? Imagine Elvis (the King) and Michael (the King of Pop) fighting for whatever tower dead pop stars fight for (maybe it's Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song"). A large white man who died on the toilet battling a skinny black and white and black and white man who died in still unexplained circumstances. It's not a pretty sight.

TV JUNKIE

She says:

“Back in 1991 my family experimented with something unthinkable. We did it for only one early spring month. When I told my colleagues at work about it, the news of the experiment was met not with a pleasant, 'That’s nice,' or, 'Interesting,' but with shock, gasps, and a few, 'How can you do that to your children?' comments. We weren’t seen as brave or even different, just un-American and mean. Years ago in the early months of spring we unplugged our television set and went without tv for a month.”

This is the opening of a speech that I used to model what goes into a good introduction for students in my speech classes. The next hook in the introduction went something like this “…and then a few years later we moved into a home that had no tv antenna and we decided not to pay for cable. This time we went without television for six months. We watched lots of movies, but we also read the newspaper every day, listened to the radio more, and we quit planning our lives and meals around the tv shows we watched.  The behavior of the children got better and soon the six months became 15 years without television.”  When I came to this part of the speech, there would be more exclamations of shock and deep gasps of a different sort, followed by comments like, “Well, how come you know so much about television?” That one is easy, it is called reading the gossip magazines in the grocery store checkout line. That was then and here we are now.

One year ago we bought a ridiculously large television and bought a cable bundle package. The first few weeks there was minimal watching because we had to figure out how to turn the damned thing on. Children, you will never know the joy of walking up to the tv set and turning one knob – repeat, turning one knob - and voila! instant tv. We have four remotes and there are multiple steps to viewing, but I do love to record and cruise the video on demand just as my husband loves to surf the hundreds of channels.

I love to watch and let my mind go blank, so blank that I have no idea what we watch some nights. We watch lots of junk and try to avoid mean- spirited programs or ones where everyone’s waiting for someone to get killed – by accident, of course, but you know that is what everyone is waiting for.

I am a tv junkie. It is in my blood. Just like a cigarette smoker never forgets the former joy of that first cigarette of the morning, a tv junkie can go five, 10 or even 15 years without television and within a month be right back to those old comfortable habits. I am living proof

ENCOUNTERING TV: THE WORLD LEAKS IN AND THINGS ARE BROKEN

He says:

I loved radio. Television didn't interest me much when I first saw it in 1951. I was with my father and a room full of men who had gathered to watch Joe Louis fight Rocky Marciano. The tv set was large. The screen was small at bright. The men cheered and grunted as the stick figure boxers danced. They seemed to favor Marciano. But I was seven years old and didn't know anything about boxing. I also did not know how to watch television. The men around me seemed to have it figured out. What we were gathered to watch was what would be Joe Louis' last professional fight. He had retired in 1949 then made a comeback. By the time he came up against Marciano in October 1951, it was not a fight, it was a beating. Marciano knocked Louis down in the eighth round, then knocked him completely out of the ring less than one minute later. It didn't impress me much. Neither did television. I found it a little confusing to watch, so I finally closed my eyes and listened. I loved listening to the radio in the dark. If television was nothing but radio with pictures, I could live with that. A few months later, probably in the spring of 1952 (the same year The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett moved to tv), we bought our own television, a Sylvania with a 21 inch screen. It was delivered on a Saturday morning. The world began to leak into our house in black and white. After that things changed quickly.

She says:

It was our first TV or at least the first TV I remember, it was 1959 and I was four-years-old. Unlike the radio that I could peer into and see glowing tubes, unlike the radio where I believed if I sang loud enough into the front of it the singer on the other end could hear me, and unlike the radio there was an image to tell me all about it.
 
My first memory of TV is not the Shirley Temple Story Time or the magic mirror of Romper Room, my first memory is one of getting in trouble and breaking my mother’s favorite vase.
 
Every afternoon around 3:00 when I got up from my nap my mom would let me watch Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. This habit followed me through my teens and Dick Clark’s Where the Action Is and more American Bandstand. I knew a woman who had been on Where the Action Is and had nothing fabulous to report about it. It should have been me because I knew all the dances and clapping gestures needed to back up Paul Revere and the Raiders, but I’m off track.
 
I was dancing around the living room with a balloon in hand. Just an air blown balloon that I held at the tie and was dancing and twirling in a state of four-year-old rock n roll influenced ecstasy. Unknown to me as I swirled my balloon also whirled toward the tall pink cylinder decorated with a bouquet of white glass flowers on the front.  A spin cut short to the sound of breaking glass and my mother screaming from the other room.
 
My dad glued the vase back together. I was not allowed to watch American Bandstand for a week, and I was not allowed to dance unless my mother was in the room to supervise for the next ten years.