My Life as a TV Watcher

Is there such a thing as a TV that's too big and too bright?

My inexpensive but reliable 55” Roku TV was fried in a recent lighting storm.  I took the opportunity to buy the latest 65” OLED TV which I’d been lusting for.  I’d spent too many days at Costco gazing longingly at those brilliant screens.

I’d like to tell you that it was worth it to spend five times as much on the latest technology.  But as an obsessive news watcher, I’m really not enjoying seeing Anderson Cooper’s every pore, not to speak of George Conway’s neck. His looks demonstrate why he puts up with Kelly Anne’s politics.    The upside of the fancy TV, of course, is that the kinds of movies and series I enjoy look pretty damned good on it.   Star Trek, Westworld, Sandman, Game of Thrones are a joy to watch.  I wish I could switch it for a 55” but no, I had to go for the gold.  <sigh>    Setting it up was a major endeavor and returning it would be impossible.

My parents would be stunned by this TV.

I remember my first TV when I was eight or maybe ten.   It was the fifties and my parents were the last holdouts on my suburban block when it came to getting a television.  Since all my friends had TVs, I was spending my after school time at their houses.   I had fallen in love with my first star—Buster Crabbe—who played Flash Gordon. He had a mass of blond curls, rippling muscles and an air of sweetness and vulnerability.  He was in love with the curvaceous Dale Arden who was constantly in need of rescuing.  That show was probably where I got my lifelong love for science fiction. 

We kids would play Flash Gordon games outside with improvised space lasers or whatever passed for guns. I longed to play Dale.  But I was always forced to play Ming the Merciless, the evil ruler who wanted to destroy Flash and take Dale for himself.  I took advantage by being as menacing as I could but I don’t think I was very convincing. It was the beginning of my childhood longing to play a glamour girl or ingenue, but later in class plays I usually wound up instead as the spinster aunt or another outcast role.

My parents finally broke down and got a TV because they didn’t want the neighbors to think they were too poor to afford one.   Once they got it, they discovered Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar, Rob Reiner, Howard Morris and Imogene Coca.   Previously snobs who insisted TV was for lowbrows, they became instant fans.  We all watched it every Saturday night religiously. There were no repeats.   We laughed hysterically and my dad would spend the following week repeating lines. It was a family bonding experience.  I still remember my favorite sketches which hold up amazingly well today. Here’s a timeless one.   Unfortunately, they were not all filmed but there are kinescopes of a few and I encourage you to catch them on YouTube.  With writers including Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen, they inspired Saturday Night Live and pretty much all comedy since then.

That TJV was the beginning of an ongoing battle with my parents about how many hours a day I could watch.  They insisted I watch only highbrow entertainment, but I liked Milton Berle and of course, Flash Gordon, and other trashy stuff.  I was limited to two hours a day and I finally got them to let me watch whatever I wanted during those two hours.

I was raised in the days of free-range kids, when we came home from school and played until dinnertime.  TV was just a small part of our lives and of course there were no video games so we were forced to make up our own games.   Was this a golden era?   Maybe.   I think I would have loved a cell phone in high school but might not have loved all the drama of social media.   

When I graduated high school and went to college, TVs were still tiny and weighed a ton. Reception depended on antennas and in New York City, where I lived, it wasn’t easy to get a station.  If you’re over 65 you remember the frustration of losing a station and having to jiggle the antenna.   I was a single girl in the City and TV didn’t play much part in my life.  Except for major news events, like the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, I didn’t watch TV.  My entertainment was the movies.  The 60s, 70s and 80s were the golden age of films, and I spent my weekends in darkened movie theaters.   The tiny box couldn’t compete.

 “I, Claudius,” in the 70s was my introduction to appointment TV.   With Derek Jacobi, John Hurt, Patrick Stewart and every other great British actor of the time, plus inspired writing and directing, it was the Game of Thrones of its day.  No one I knew left the house on Sunday nights when it was on.  We discussed episodes and did takeoffs on some of the most outrageous lines. By today’s standards the production values left a lot to be desired but the cast and script has never been topped.  In fact, I can’t think of any historical series that compares.  It was the first sophisticated, darkly humorous series, but far from the last.  If you haven’t seen it, you still can.     

Except for Saturday Night Live, which started in 1975 and was also appointment TV, there were no TV shows that rivaled the movies, so there was no reason to get a fancy set.

In the early 90s I moved to the country with my husband where we could only get three stations with an outdoor antenna, and TV moved to a position of irrelevance in my life.  Then I got divorced in the early 2000s and TV became my best friend.  Technology had changed, VCRs had been invented and I visited Blockbuster to rent films and bought my first flat screen TV—a 42” plasma TV which cost almost as much as the OLED I just bought.   I loved it.  Then cable and DVRs arrived and it was all over for me.   I was lonely in the middle of nowhere with my TV.  Like the rest of the world streaming TV series became my comfort food.   I watched Sex and the City on my VCR and it helped me escape from the misery of my divorce and transported me back to my single days.   I kept watching as TV outstripped movies in creativity and originality.

Twenty years later my viewing life hasn’t changed that much except that size of my TVs kept getting bigger.   I think I’ve finally hit the wall, both size and tech-wise.   Is it possible for a TV to be too big and too bright?  I must answer in the affirmative.  <sigh>   I supposed I’ll get used to it but no more upgrades for me.