My wife and I don’t watch much television. In fact, we had very poor television reception from about 1988 (when we married), until we moved into this house in 2018. That’s three decades without really watching the tube. As we’ve been streaming/DVDing some of the series that have made a splash in those three decades, I’ve discovered (I can’t speak for her) that there were some great strides made in quality. We began with The X-Files, then moved on to Lost. We viewed Twin Peaks and started to watch Picket Fences, but the digital rights have expired so we never did finish out that series. (Don’t get me started on digital rights management—the air will quickly turn blue, I assure you.) Of course, we did manage to see Northern Exposure when it aired, but it should be mentioned for the sake of completion. These were all exceptional programs.
Netflix (in particular) upped the game. We watched the first three seasons of Stranger Things (and I’d still like to go back and pick up the more recent ones we’ve missed), and I watched the first episode of The Fall of the House of Usher (I didn’t realize until writing this up that it was only one season, so maybe I should go back and finish that one out too) and was very impressed. Since we couldn’t finish Picket Fences, we turned to Wednesday. Now, I was only ever a middling fan of The Addams Family. I watched it as a kid because it had monsters, as I did The Munsters, but neither one really appealed to me. Wednesday’s cut from a different cloth. In these days when escapism is necessary, this can be a good thing.
Like most late boomers, I grew up watching television. In my early memories, it’s pretty much ubiquitous. We were poor, and our sets were black-and-white, but remembering my childhood without TV is impossible. It was simply there. The shows I watched formed me. Now that I’m perhaps beyond excessive reforming (although I’m not opposed to the idea), I’m looking for brief snippets of something intelligent to wind up the day before I reboot to start this all over again. We save movies for weekends, but an entire workweek without a break in nonfictional reality seems overwhelming on a Sunday evening. It seems that I may be warming up to my childhood chum again. This time, without network schedules, and limited time to spend doing it, we just may be in a golden age for the tube.
Steve A. Wiggins 