It doesn’t seem that anyone really watches much of anything on TV during its normal air time. It’s more like a caste system of sorts with the DVR’d Hulu Netflix download VOD shows we watch almost out of habit or ritual. I tried watching a few episodes of the current season of a show that’s been around longer than I have: The Simpsons. I used to rush home from the park for a half hour gorge of satiric gold on weekday afternoons and with my dad Sunday nights. The Halloween specials were part of Halloween unless the World Series went and messed that up by not being over yet. Now most Halloween specials are in the beginning of November about three days before Christmas shopping season kicks off. This temporal logjam is a new characteristic from one of the seldom mentioned and not exactly significant ways in which America was forever changed by the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th 2001.
For a while most living things with televisions held their breath watching 24 hour news or buying water or duct tape. ‘Normal’ life was put on hold and it felt like lots of people were waiting for someone else to make a joke or smile first. Then someone put a patriotic religious song into the 7th inning stretch and before long, popular professional entertainment began again. Below the truly tragic events of that year, there are these trivialities of timing. The Superbowl is in February now. The MLB World Series sprawls across the beginning of November instead of sometimes going long and ending on Halloween. (World is arguably a loose term since it’s competed for by one team from Canada and 29 from the United States). Correlation doesn’t mean causation, but that’s around when I stopped watching television on its own terms. I think lots of us just have their big dogs; the water-cooler shows full of Facebook spoiler fears and cryptic Twitter hashtag inside jokes. Or it’s something else ridiculous that affects a larger radius than it should. Just this week I finished watching Breaking Bad and Dexter so far behind that any friend that also watched these shows doesn’t care anymore. Communal water-coolers are scarcer than personal water bottles. The Simpsons aren’t as funny to me anymore. I don’t have cable anymore.
Missive Silo 