December's Television Challenge

I have always had a love affair with television.  When I was young, my parents allotted me a fixed number of viewing hours a week.  Usually, I'd try to save up my time for Saturday morning cartoons or Mousercise (if you've never Mousercised, you've never lived), but the trick was learning to love what my parents watched.  Parent shows meant extra hours of tube.  What were they going to do... force me to stay in my room every time they turned on the TV?  So began my friendship with Crockett & Tubs and Captain Jean-Luc Picard.  Not only did I have "Star Trek" trading cards (I may never get a date again after writing this...) but I had "I Love Lucy" ones, as well.  She was my queen.  My idol.  If I could grow up to be Lucille Ball, I would have won the life lottery.  I dreamt of making audiences laugh by stuffing too many chocolates in my mouth or drinking copious amounts of Vita-Meta-Vegamin.  I even named my first cat Lucy.

Today, I cringe when I hear people say "Oh, I don't watch TV" with their noses turned up as if simply saying those two letters is beneath them.  Even worse are the "I don't even own a TV"ers.  If you can't afford a set, that's one thing, but normally that line gets tossed around at hipster dinner parties as people try to impress one another with their non-conformity.  In my opinion, television writing has hit its peak.  "Mad Men," "Justified," "30 Rock," "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia," "Modern Family," "The Walking Dead," "Boardwalk Empire," "The League," "Eastbound & Down"... the list of incredible writing, acting and directing seems endless.  Sure, there's a load of crap out there, as well, but there's a load of crap in any art form.  Even I have been known to watch a reality show or two (ahem, "Top Chef"), so I try to withhold judgment.

But while I love the medium... and my new Sony Bravia... I have to admit it's become a bit of a crutch.  When you write for a living sixteen hours a day, nearly every day, the last thing you want to do is tackle your own writing when you have an hour or two off or, heaven forbid, pick up a book and ingest more words.  What I want is a stiff drink and back-to-back episodes of "Psych."  Yet, I need to enrich my own body of work.  I need to read the lonely unread books staring sadly from my shelf.  I have music I haven't listened to.  Letters I haven't written.  People I should make plans with.  Movies I should go see (at the theater, not on On Demand!)  Blog entries and scripts and short stories that are calling my name in the night, wondering why I've deserted them... why I've abandoned the characters I love so much.  This doesn't make me lazy.  It doesn't make me a bad person.  What it does is make me numb.  My love affair has turned into a drug... a very delicious drug... but a habit none-the-less.

I'm not going to do anything drastic.  You won't find me selling my Bravia on Craigslist anytime soon or giving up TV all together, like the friend who inspired this challenge in the first place.  What I will be doing for the entire month of December, and would like to challenge my fellow TV addicts to do, is to limit myself to two hours of TV a day, including movies both at home and in the theater.  To many of you that may seem like more than enough time, but when you add up the "Today Show" I flip on while answering emails and making my breakfast in the morning, the hour I watch at lunch so I can totally shut down my brain, the fifteen minutes breaks I take in between drafts to clear my head and the couple of hours I watch at night to relax before bed, its adds up faster than you can say 'dependency.'  And I know I'm not the only one.

Tomorrow morning it begins.  If there's anything I love in life it's a challenge, no matter how small.  And damn it, if I can climb Mt. Whitney in a day (self promoting plug), then I can control my TV watching.  If you decide to take this challenge with me, write a comment.  That way, we can feel like we're in this together.  Strength in numbers, friend.  Strength in numbers.  Come January 1st we can celebrate over tea and Tolstoy... or we can watch a "Gossip Girl" marathon instead.