In defense of stupid television – Clack’n Black

Eight years ago, my wife — girlfriend at the time — was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. It spread to her lymph nodes, and, over the course of three years, she had a round of radiation and four different surgeries to try to get rid of it.

Her last surgery was five years ago and, though you’re never 100% sure with cancer, it sure felt like things were moving in the right direction. We got married, had a kid, and bought a house. Plus, I started a successful blogging career that some months pays for almost 1/16th of our heating bill.

Right after this past Christmas, my wife went in for a routine ultrasound. What you’re always hoping for after one of those ultrasounds is for the doctor doing them to smile and say, “of course I can’t say definitively ‘no worries’, but hey, no worries!”

The doctor didn’t do that. He furrowed his brow and said “Hmmmm….”

The doctor said he would send the pictures to my wife’s endocrinologist and we would hear from her.

We said, “Is there anything to worry about?”

He said, “I see a spot. I’m not sure if it’s something to worry about. Your endocrinologist will be in touch.” He then left to have a conversation with Geordi LaForge and Commander Riker about what it means to be a human.

The problem was that my wife’s endocrinologist was on vacation — this was Christmastime, remember — and wouldn’t be back until the following Monday. That meant my wife had five days to ponder what “I see a spot” might mean.

It was a bad five days.

The outcome, of course, could have been anything. It might have been really bad or it might have been nothing. My brother-in-law is a surgeon and sometimes the hospital works him like he was an indentured servant; maybe the spot the doctor saw was a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep!

I joked to my wife, “we should have asked him if the spot was talking to him. Then we’d know.”

She didn’t laugh. I didn’t blame her.

There wasn’t anything I could say or do that could really get her mind off that spot. There wasn’t any kind of support I could provide that didn’t stop her mind from going to the worst possible scenario. When someone gives you five days to contemplate your worst fear, your brain never goes in a positive direction.

My son provided a heap of distraction, of course, being eighteen months old and whose real father is apparently Daredevil. (Seriously, the kid has no fear. I’m afraid of thumbtacks and whenever there’s a siren .gif on The Drudge Report. There’s no way I’m his father, is there?)

When my son went to bed, though, my wife was left with her imagination and a lot of time to fill.

She filled it exactly how you would fill it: she watched television. A lot of television. At one point, the little TiVo guy actually caught fire.

As my wife lost herself in the beautiful narcotic that is reruns of Parental Control, it occurred to me that maybe all the horrible things we say about television — it’s distracting, it’s numbing, it’s stupid — are actually positives.

I mean, it’s easy to attack television for what it’s not.  Americans invented the most powerful means of mass communication in humanity’s four million year history, and the best ideas we could come up with to put on it was a Karaoke contest and Reba. We immediately took TV’s potential as a teaching device and ignored it.

Because of that, neck-bearded hippies and pony-tailed college professors like to take every opportunity they can to attack TV as an idiot box.  When they’re not cutting out coupons for petruli oil, they’re telling you why you’re dumb for wasting hours of your life in front of the TV.  It’s easy to start to believe them.

But what if TV isn’t supposed to be a conduit to a higher plane of understanding?  What if TV is meant to do exactly what it already does — help us forget the great big bag of suck that is our daily lives?  If you look at TV that way, spending six hours every day in front of it is nothing to feel guilty about, because the alternative is actually contemplating our lives.  And, seriously, sometimes self-reflection is exactly the thing that you don’t need.

Watching my wife watch her horrible shows during those five days, I was never more appreciative that we had a TV.  I was never so damn happy that the people at the Lifetime Movie Network found so many ways to put Meredith Baxter-Birney into danger.  I was never more relieved that so many borderline sociopaths were willing to allow themselves to be taped for reality shows.

In short, I was thankful that we had a TV, and I was thankful that the people who produced TV were so good at providing distraction.

So yeah, TV appeals to our base instincts and yeah, a lot of it is so stupid your brain will actually melt itself in self-defense, but sometimes we really, really need to forget ourselves for a few hours and TV is the cheapest, easiest, most legal way to do it.

The spot, by the way, was just a spot, and my wife is back to herself, figuring out ways that I can improve myself.

Clacked by Jay Black
on Feb 27, 2009 @ 16:00 EST5EDT