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Suckling From The Boob-Tube: Confessions of a Grown-up Raised by TV

Aside from the occasional glimpse at the evening news, I rarely watch TV that can't be found on demand on my computer. Everything is there when I want it. But when I was a kid, I had dates with certain television programs. They had a time and place...

Aside from the occasional glimpse at the evening news, I rarely watch TV that can’t be found on demand on my computer. Everything is there when I want it. But when I was a kid, I had dates with certain television programs. They had a time and place, and if I missed the rendezvous, I had to wait until the next day or the next week to get my fix. And even then, I had to face the fact that I might never see that same episode again.

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For instance, I really liked Diff’rent Strokes, which was on at 4PM on channel 5. Our cable box had a dial on it. I remember when I first discovered the show, I asked my mom if I could use a Sharpie and circle the 5 on the dial and write “4PM” next to it. She said no. So, I had to commit it to memory. This was the late eighties and the show was in reruns, but it was all new to me.

Indeed, reruns were a fuzzy concept. When I started to see episodes that featured Cousin Oliver on the Brady Bunch, I remember feeling quite jealous that they’d picked someone other than me to join their family. I guess that, from the vantage point of the eighties, the seventies-ness of the kids’ fashion and the house’s decor didn’t seem so obvious.

Alyssa Rosenberg’s appreciation of Cheers made me stop and reflect for a moment on the importance that these sitcoms have had in my life. The fifty-odd channels we got on our wood-paneled tube TV seems practically Eastern Bloc compared to the number of watchable things on the Internet today.

In school, we all had something of a common vocabulary learned from the shows we’d seen. Today, the vast number of content that our eyes and ears can fall upon on a hand-held device meant for just one pair of eyes makes it less likely for children to share a common lexicon broader than the sort of language learned from sharing a room with a sibling.

The lack of selection makes me think that I had little choice in my development: I watched these shows because I flipped on the TV and they were there. I can hardly begin to fathom how much these half-hour sitcoms made me who I am. Have I always felt the longing to find a place where “Everybody knows my name” because of Cheers, or was that lyric just echoing a normal human desire? I’ll never know. I’m pretty certain, however, that my idea of male sexual attractiveness was irrevocably affected by Cheers’ Sam Malone. His relationship with Rebecca Howe—a sultry, shoulder-padded Kirstie Alley as classic movie star—struck me as extremely romantic. I had a crush on Sam, but felt weird about that because of the age difference. I was seven. I also knew he was kind of a jerk, and was confused as to why a jerky guy would be appealing to me. Ah, youth! His “Me me me” rant was my first whiff of the allure of the male narcissist.

I also watched a lot of Three’s Company and had a serious crush on Jack Tripper. A funny guy who cooks and pretends to be gay and looks good in shorts? This was setting the bar way too high, but how could I have known. Once, my dad picked me up to go to his house just as an episode started. On the subway, I moped. I looked at the watches on the wrists of strangers on the train, trying to calculate how many commercial breaks had passed, and whether or not the show would end up at the Regal Beagle.

When we got to his apartment, I ran to the TV and watched the last minute. “Did you get to see the rest of your program?” my dad asked. As much as I adored Jack and Janet and the string of blonds they roomed with, calling it a “program” seemed a bit aggrandizing. I wondered if he was mocking me.The credits came on the screen and then some suckier show started. Like Mr. Belvedere or something. Totally not my type.