Some may find this hard to believe, but I'm not a big t.v. watcher. Sure, if it's on I can get sucked in to something, but there are really only two shows I turn the t.v. on to actually watch...on purpose. Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, which happen to be two of the temporary casualties of the recent writer's strike. Now I'm all for giving the writer's their due...they deserve what they are holding out for. However, I've been finding that their strike is having an unintended consequence in my home, maybe it's happening in yours too...our family is communicating. It's not just family either...Gotta give a shout out to my "Grey's Girls", my friends who I meet with weekly to watch the show and guess who's going to get a visit from their family or develop a relationship with a patient. We were all wondering what we were going to do when the shows ended until one of us found a Grey's board game! So instead of sitting around the t.v. glassy-eyed, we sat around the kitchen table laughing and talking. The same thing happened at my father's house this Christmas...it was Sunday, and time for Desperate Housewives, until I remembered "the strike". One of us reached under the coffee table for the "Trivial Pursuit" game and there we were once again!
It's been so refreshing that I was a little perturbed when I realized last night that I had a choice to make. Desperate Housewives was new (it had been the week before, so naturally I thought it was back on for good), but I had just heard about The Complete Jane Austen on PBS...horror of horrors, they were airing at the same time! As luck would have it, there was a "special" two hour Extreme Makeover Home Edition and no Desperate Housewives. The choice was made for me, although I would like to think I would have chosen Jane Austen anyway!
For those who may comment that I need to get DVR or TiVo, I say I don't want the t.v. to have that much control over my life. For me, life's about choices, and the decision to watch one program over another is just one of the minor ones. I'm perfectly content to spend an evening in front of the fire reading another good book with the kids (or by myself). And bedsides, as long as there will be television, there will be reruns.
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What we find with our DVR is that it frees us to watch what we want WHEN we want, so it's not a matter of the TV choosing for us, but us not being chained to a time and place. (And it's handy for having spare copies of shows Someone Who's Sometimes Grumpy needs to see in order to avoid a Total Meltdown.)
ReplyDeleteYou know, we should invite ourselves over sometime soon and break out some board games, if we can ever get the guys to quick yakking long enough. Oh wait, maybe WE were the ones yakking... :)