IS THERE LIFE AFTER TV?

© 2003 by Bryan Fields

Our TV died four years ago after a long illness. My wife gave it a curbside burial and we struggled to get on with our lives.

We had tried hard to save it. The buttons on the front were no longer functional, and there was a short in the antenna hookup (caused by repeated plugging and unplugging of Nintendo units) that caused the signal to turn to snow anytime someone sneezed. The remote was broken, dropped on the floor too many times by five kids fighting over it. The only way we had to turn the set off and on after that was to take the back off of it and touch a couple of hard-to-reach contacts with a screwdriver. The same process applied to changing the channels. Our teenaged son became the official TV switchman. I was not successful at learning his technique myself, but the doctors assured me that my hair would straighten out and that I would regain the use of my arm.

Whenever the picture fuzzed out, which happened on average about eight times a minute, we resorted to the home-appliance form of CPR: banging the living daylights out of it until the picture returned.

It was this constant pounding that finally did it in. Mrs. Fields pronounced it dead and put it by the curb for the local trash-shoppers. Then came the kicker. She announced that it would not be replaced. We couldn’t afford it, she said. She was tired of the mess and the noise, she said. I wasn’t sure that the kids would ever be on board for the idea. The detox period was understandably tough. Their hands would start to shake and they’d sit down in front of the empty space and stare at it, trying to will pictures to appear on the wall.

My wife was raised in a home where TV time was strictly regulated, and the change was not all that painful for her--as long as the kids were in the room she never got to hear the dialogue anyway. For me, well... I grew up in front of a TV set. I can still quote theme songs from ‘60s cartoon shows that only ran one season, like The Mighty Heroes (Who could forget “Strong Man…Tornado Man…Rope Man…Cuckoo Man…and, mightiest of them all…DI-APER MAN!”). I remember every McDonald’s jingle that Barry Manilow ever wrote. I have seventeen and a half seasons of Star Trek and its spin-offs committed to memory. The same goes for eleven years worth of M*A*S*H reruns. Strangely enough, however, after three years without it, I’M STILL ALIVE. No, really, I am. I’m as shocked as anybody. We’ve regained a big part of our lives. Yes, the initial adjustment was difficult. Seeing that blank spot and knowing that I was going to miss every college football game in the fall. Wondering how the Voyager crew was going to get home to Earth when they were still forty years away at maximum warp. No more--and this was a tough one--no more Pinky and the Brain. But it has gotten easier. The space where the TV once ruled now holds the desk where I’m writing this. Since I no longer spend most of my free time shouting at the kids to be quiet so I can hear the TV, I can yell at them about a whole lot of things that I never noticed before.

As for the kids themselves, something truly astonishing happened. In an apparent reversal of television-induced stupor, their brains began to work again.

They discovered something called books. Grades improved. Arguments decreased—unless it was over books. I came home one evening recently to find all five of them clamoring not to go to a movie or to McDonald’s, but to the library.

They’re now the top students in their schools, with reading scores that are off the scale. The mess of food crumbs, spilled chocolate milk, and candy wrappers that was constantly on the floor in front of the TV has been replaced by food crumbs, spilled chocolate milk, and candy wra—wait, no, that’s my desk.

The kids spend more time now developing their talents, such as singing, writing, drawing, and building things. Our teenager even got a job and began saving money.

He used it to buy a TV.

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