Televisionless

I realize that in recent years I almost never watch TV. Once in a great while, I may turn on the local TV news to catch the weather forecast. Or I may turn on the TV to catch emergency coverage of some major breaking news story. Apart from that, I go weeks and even months at a time without ever turning my television on.

I doubt there's a single series on network TV today that I've ever watched. Except perhaps for the odd five seconds while flipping around from channel to channel with the remote. I repeat, whatever your favorite TV series is, I'd bet good money that I've never even seen it.

The last TV series I followed was The X-Files. When that wrapped up however many years ago, in that series finale with the black helicopters firing missiles into the ancient Indian cliff dwelling where the Cigarette-Smoking Man was holed up, I pretty much let go of television. Since then, I just don't watch TV.

When I was a kid, I remember how I loved to watch Gilligan's Island and The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres. Hey, sometimes sort of dumb, I'll grant; but they were genuinely entertaining. I also watched countless hecto-hours of The Andy Griffith Show.

And when Star Trek came on the air... I was in seventh heaven. If ever there was a show that was just made for me as a kid, it was the original Star Trek series. (It embarrasses me to admit it today, but as a kid I also loved Lost in Space. I guess there's no accounting for tastes.)

In the seventies, my favorite shows were All in the Family and MASH. Haven't watched them in years, but I used to watch them all the time.

Then— and by now we're skipping ahead to I think the early nineties and onward— I very much got into Twin Peaks. And then American Gothic, with eeevil Sheriff Buck...

I discovered The X-Files a couple of seasons along, and it bugs me that to this day there are some episodes from seasons one and two that I've never seen. I was an absolute X-Files fanatic. I have many of the episodes recorded on videotape from channel 25 up in La Crosse, poor broadcast signal and all. I keep trying to resist the hundreds of dollars it would cost to buy all nine seasons of the show on DVD.

And I also loved Chris Carter's "other" TV show, Millennium. I sort of identify with Frank Black, if you can credit that. "This is who we are..."

Not to mention, I am a great fan of Digimon, which I recorded faithfully off of Fox Kids on channel 25. "Gomamon digivolve to Ikkakumon!... Ikkakumon digivolve to Zudomon!!!"

And there were a few other much-too-short-lived shows I followed. Chris Carter's Harsh Realm. Vengeance Unlimited, with Michael Madsen.

But once The X-Files went off the air, I pretty much stopped watching TV. Actually, by that time for many years I'd been in the habit of only watching a few favorite series. I was never a channel-surfer or someone who watched TV just to have something to do.

In fact, the signs were long obvious: I never owned a color TV in my life until I was 43 years old. I repeat, I never owned a color TV until I was 43. For many years there, I got along with a little 12-inch black-and-white.

I don't know what it would take to draw me back to TV today. It's not really that I object to the sex and the violence, you know: actually, hot babes and blazing guns are part of what might draw me back to TV, if anything did. No, I think what led me gradually to drift away from TV was simply that I didn't find anything interesting in most of the TV shows out there. It was so boring. Much of it was so awfully written. So uninspired. So seen-it-100-times-before formulaic. And somewhere along the line, I became downright allergic to canned laughter. God, please spare me from having to suffer through any show that has a canned laugh track!

If somebody could suggest to me a show that's interesting— probably something along the lines of science fiction or the surreal or even a good comedy or a good action/adventure show— I'd be open to suggestions. I waste way too much time over my computer, maybe I could waste some of that time in front of the TV instead. Only, please, something that genuinely holds my interest. Until then, I remain televisionless.