C.B. Murphy  .:. Writer

When I tell people we don’t “have television” they immediately get the wrong idea and start to defend the Discovery Channel, sports, news or inevitably PBS. “No, no,” I tell them, “we’re not that kind of anti television people. Oh? You see it on their faces: there’s more than one kind of anti-television people? There are the anti-sex and violence people, by far the majority, we’re not in that club. By now they’re really confused. Could we be part of a tiny radical minority that wants more sex and violence on TV and won’t watch it till we get it? When they calm down they lead with, “Then?” hoping I will fill them in. I say that despite being different in so many ways that friends sometimes wonder how we made it, my wife and I agreed when our children were very young that we would be a “movies only” household. This means we have plenty of TVs but they are set up only for DVD viewing and video game playing (I’ll defend that another time). This means we are far from a media-free home, we are merely a TV-free home. Sometimes people sigh in relief that they won’t be subjected to the smug smile of a purist household which creates either geniuses or criminals though the statistics aren’t in on that yet. No, we are corrupt like everyone else, maybe worse if you get into the details which I will save for another time. Simply: my wife and I agreed that we didn’t want the buzz, the constant presence and accessibility of us to them (and them to us if you’re an old Marshall McLuhan fan). The buzz? I lost them here and we go on to talk about shows. They’re surprised we see so many of them if we’re “down on TV.” I explain again, no we’re down on the buzz we love the shows! I like the Sopranos, the Shield, Six Feet Under, The Office, and many others, the only problem is that since I am watching them on DVD I am always out of sync with the others who love these shows. I have to stop the conversation as soon as it starts: Don’t tell me anything, I say, as inevitably I am one or two seasons behind them. They drift away, confused. He loves the shows but doesn’t allow them in to his home except on DVD? Oh, excuse me, I see someone over there I have to talk to. Given the hassle and cost of watching DVDs (video stores, Netflix and now ipod downloading) it makes sense (at least to me) that I minimize the number of series that captivate me lest I lose all benefits of my quasi-TV-free householding. In this spirit, I watched and rejected the first disc of Lost. Others were caught, but not I. Then my son downloaded an episode on his ipod and got caught. In the interest of giving it a second chance, I watched it again. And got caught. Only he was always one or two episodes ahead of me which made conversation difficult. Did so and so die yet, he’d ask? He dies? I reply, shocked. Whoops, he says, that’s coming up. We decided to synchronize our watching so we could watch together and though the rest of the Lost addicted world was on Season Three (poor devils, only one a week and suffering through commercials to boot!), we’d get the Season Two DVDs and try to limit our intake of episodes to make them last. Then, my older son watched the pilot and got hooked. He’s way behind us and we have no idea if and when he’ll catch up, so we have to have our conversations in private. Should we hook Mom, I ask him. A family hooked on the same show together, in the same episode sequence, stays together. Isn’t that how the saying goes?