What I don't watch

I guess this has less to do with what I don't watch and more to do with why I don't watch it.

I used to watch a lot of TV when I was growing up. I can remember many afternoons spent absorbing ridiculously stimulating shows like Double Dare and You Can't Do That On Television. Fantastic stuff—doubly so with the slime.

And rewarding, to boot.

I also remember what seemed to be the typical teen progression of cartoons -> Nickelodeon -> MTV -> film and news, all of which was done by the time I hit 16 or so. Nevertheless, I can always remember watching the real staples of a healthily vegetative TV diet: daily doses of The Simpsons, for example.

Oddly, reading a comment about the pending release of TiVo DVR technology in late 1999: if you could watch any show you wanted, would you watch what you're watching right now?

The question was delivered to elicit the idea that no, I as a consumer had a list of TV shows I would much rather watch at any given moment than reruns of The Golden Girls and Three's Company. I got something a bit different from it: I can't really think of anything I'd like to watch.

Looking back, this seems both trivial and self-evident, but I also realize that my childhood has been steeped in unwitting middle-class Americanism and that a good deal of what I may have historically taken for granted simply shouldn't be. I almost have to wonder know how something as simple as don't watch TV slipped past my radar for so many years.

In any event, this is why I tend to be fairly critical of films. It's not that I don't appreciate the hard work that filmmakers put into things—I'm quite sure it's far more difficult than I could image. It's just that to convince me to sit and do something noninteractive for an entire 90-minute stretch, one must provide compelling and thought-provoking material. Or boobs.

Reworded: it's not that I don't appreciate the art, it's just that it's a flawed medium for my tastes.

In a nutshell, that's why I don't spend a lot of time watching TV. Admittedly, I do (wow look at all the italics in this article) spend a lot of time in front of a computer, but that's the next step for me. There are probably a million different ways I can rationalize computer use in spite of what I've said above, but I'm still working on the Definitive Answer™.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an example of your tax dollars at work.