Newton Minow's "vast wasteland"

My family got its first television the year I was born, 1948.  It had a teeny little roundish screen and, of course, showed only black and white and shades of gray.  Television was still in its infancy and there wasn't much to see on it.  My father sold the set as soon as he reappeared in our lives again, but television was already becoming a part of American life.  When I was a child there were three networks: ABC, CBS and NBC.  A few years later, PBS came into being but you had to have a special UHF antennae to receive the signal.  Each station signed on with the National Anthem every morning and off with a test pattern every night.  Now, thanks to cable, there are countless networks and almost all broadcast around the clock.


As a child I watched Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody and Saturday morning cartoons.  I also watched all those great old westerns like Bronco Lane and The Rifleman and Wagon Train and later Gunsmoke and Rawhide (with Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates) and Bonanza.  But mostly I played outside with my friends.  TV was for Saturday morning or rainy days.  When we were all in the Children's Home for a few years, I got to be on television.  They paraded a bunch of us waifs around on a TV show in an effort to drum up donations so the Home could buy a TV to keep us all occupied and out of trouble.


When I lived in New Hampshire, I worked for WENH-TV, the PBS station at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.  It was 1972, and though color television was standard in most homes by then, many public television stations were still black and white due to funding issues.  While I worked at WENH they made the change from black and white to color.  Because I was a redhead, I got to sit on a stool in the studio for hours at a time so the engineers could tweak the settings on the new color equipment.  That was not my job; I was the secretary in the engineering department.  I was also the only redhead who worked there.  My sitting on a stool was never actually broadcast over the airwaves.  It was just to give the engineers an opportunity to figure out the new equipment.  One really great thing did happen while I worked there.  I got to go on a "field trip" to WGBH in Boston where I was fortunate to meet Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and Julia Child of The French Chef.  The on-air persona for these two stars was not an act.  They were exactly the same in person as they were on their respective TV shows.


As time went on, I probably watched as much television as the average American.  I have seen every episode of M*A*S*H.  I watched most of the Dallas serial and Falcon Crest, but never got into Dynasty or any of the other nighttime soaps.  I would usually come home from work and turn on the television to catch the local and network evening news.  The TV would stay on until bedtime and Bud and I would usually sit like two blobs in front of it and watch.  I think I really started to lose interest in TV about the same time we got our first remote control.  As everyone knows, the remote control is the property of the man of the house.  Whenever he was in the house, he had the control and I had no choice but to watch what he chose.  Actually, I had little to no objection because our viewing tastes are similar and by then I was beginning to think there had to be something better I could do with my time.  I gradually quit watching TV until it got to the point where the only thing I chose to watch was The Weather Channel.  If I turned the set on at all, it was on The Weather Channel and would stay there until Bud came along and changed it to some other station.  Interestingly, Bud seems to have the same addiction to the Food Channel now.


I no longer turn on the television.  I tell people I don't watch TV and for the most part that's true.  I have seen only one entire episode of Seinfeld (a rerun while laid up in the hospital for knee replacement surgery).  I have never seen a complete episode of Friends.  There are some television stars who are favorites and if any of them are in a show I might make an effort to watch.  I adore Martin Sheen, Alan Alda and Jimmy Smits, but I caught only a few episodes of The West Wing.  I did watch a lot of L. A. Law when Jimmy Smits was in it.  He's got a new show now called Outlaw.  Bud records the show on DVR and we watch it on Sunday morning.  We also watch some other shows he records.  Both of us are big SciFi fans (I HATE  they have changed the station name to SyFy).  We have seen every version of Star Trek (the original, Next Generation, Voyager and Deep Space Nine) as well as all the Star Trek motion pictures.  We have seen all of Battlestar Galactica (the original with Lorne Greene also know as Bonanza in the Sky, and the second version with Edward James Olmos) and we now record and watch Caprica.   There is a show on SyFy called Eureka that we like a lot, so Bud records that for us.  We also record and watch Sanctuary, but I think Amanda Tapping was much better as Samantha Carter in the StarGate series than she is as Helen Magnus.  That's odd because I think as Helen Magnus her British accent sounds phony; Amanda Tapping was born in England.  And speaking of StarGate, I think we have seen every permutation of that series as well (SG-1 and Atlantis).  We currently record and watch Star Gate: Universe.  So I guess I can't say I don't watch television, though I almost never watch it at the time it is actually being telecast.


The thing is, if Bud never recorded any of these programs and I never watched them, it wouldn't matter to me.  I enjoy sharing the time with Bud on Sunday mornings much more than I care about what's on the tube.