I don’t watch much TV anymore—and I’m not saying that in a snide, uppity, 1974-culture-guerrilla, back-to-intellectual-discourse, naturalist way, where I pound my chest to gather enough indignant phlegm to cast hatefully at the set and all who embrace it. You won’t find me bewailing the squalid state of the cathode frontier, with its worn assembly belts that continue to belch decrepit sitcoms and torpid dramas into living-room air. No words like wasteland or boob tube will cross these lips. I love my television. The cute little bastard looks good in my home. I kiss it while it sleeps. I scotch-tape mash letters facedown to its screen. How did my grandparents cope without its soothing light? It’s the second greatest entertainment medium developed in the last 60 years.
The single greatest entertainment medium, I’ve now decided, is the TV-season DVDs. I’m obsessed with ’em. My first fix came around 2001, when Miramax Home Video released the complete run of Kevin Smith’s ill-fated animated Clerks series. What a novelty: a competitively priced 2-DVD set corpulent with cartoons and commentary. But at six episodes (ABC axed it after a pair of prime-time broadcasts), it wasn’t enough to feed the awakened beast. Thank God for Fox, which galloped to my emotional rescue with the complete first season of The Simpsons, upping the ante with 13 episodes on three discs and launching a descent into bliss that continues four seasons in.
Since then, my collection has mutated at an alarming rate, with no rhyme or reason. Among my Mary Tyler Moores and Soaps and All In The Familys are the Flintstones I’ll never watch again; why I needed the first season of The Flintstones at all is a Kafkaesque conundrum I am not yet prepared to answer, at least not until I have a valid explanation for Scooby-Doo (3,000 Miles To Graceland is an off-topic discussion for another day). Only divine intervention has kept Good Times from waxin’ dynomiiiite from my shelf. And last night I actually caught myself in the DVD aisle, disc bricks in hand, agonizing over the merits of Starsky & Hutch vs. What’s Happening! until rational thought took hold and I asked myself, What the HELL am I doing with EITHER of these? Maybe five minutes of Starsky have polluted my memories—it had something do with a car, two high-strung guys in desperate need of haircuts, and a wisecrackin’ pimp whose popularity has since usurped theirs—and as far as I’m concerned, What’s Happening! is an old campfire tale used by parents to scare their kids into finishing their homework. It was later bequeathed to the next generation in the form of something called Family Matters.
The major drawback of seasonal DVD freakdom is, of course, arriving too late for the water-cooler party, bedecked in last year’s vines and spitting last year’s verbiage. I recently got into Curb Your Enthusiasm, picking up both available seasons for a pittance, only to discover that among my friends, the neuroses of Larry David are old news. Nobody cares about “flappy crotch” or “club soda and salt” anymore. Everyone’s all up on Six Feet Under’s jock, and I’m not even halfway through the first season of that. I also finally got around to the initial Project Greenlight—in fact, I watched the whole series in one sitting, breaking only for lunch and dinner—but the only reality shows that circulate these days in conversation, endlessly, are Queer Eye For The Straight Guy and the one about that stupid goddamn hair salon in Beverly Hills.
Another problem is deciding how long to endure a series’ run, quite a quandary for a completist like myself. Should I continue buying All In The Family even if Columbia/Tri-Star determinedly forges ahead into the Archie Bunker’s Place years? Do I dare follow Sanford & Son into Season 5, when episode quality is already at an alarming inconsistency in Season 4? How do I deal with the downtime between seasons? Oh, the anguish I felt in the three years that separated the first two Soap sets. Was I ever gonna learn who killed Peter the Tennis Pro in the inaugural season’s cliffhanger without succumbing to the temptation to log on to epguides.com? Will I ever see The Larry Sanders Show, Vol. 2 in my lifetime (Ahem, Columbia/Tristar)? Will I ever have my very own copy of “Chuckles Bites The Dust” on the currently nonexistent Mary Tyler Moore Show, Vol. 6 (hell, there’s no second box yet, either! Woddup, FOX?)? Why are there three seasons of The Family Guy available, but only one of Barney Miller, and no, I repeat, nooooooooooo Welcome Back Kotter?
In any case, it’s nice to finally use my set again for its intended purpose: the viewing of actual television shows, though it still remains a slave to my DVD player. I’ve indeed come a long way. At some point, back in the early ’90s, I’d become neglectful, maybe even a little abusive, with my habits. My excuses were legion: I worked nights. I didn’t have cable. My poor set collected so much grime and dirt that even the actors would exasperatedly fingerpaint WASH ME onto the glass and flash me weary looks of skepticism. It became a pedestal for my books. I affixed my newspaper-conference nametags to its candy shell. A couple times I even unplugged it and moved it from my desk to the sofa, to make room for a typewriter. It rewarded me with clear reception of four channels: two FOXes and a pair of PBSes—the most agonizing full house in gambling history. And speaking of Full House, both FOX affiliates broadcast at least 40 gazillion episodes of said show each and every afternoon, so you could watch the accelerating social decline with ever-growing horror, and brought to you by Twizzlers and the blonde locks of the toddler-twin Antichrists.
So my television diet for much of the 1990s consisted of dunderskulled phantom reruns of Dull House (is that a typo really worth fixing?), Blossom, and Perfect Strangers, along with fresh joyrides through The Simpsons, The X-Files, Ally McBeal, Party Of Five, Millennium, King Of The Hill, That ’70s Show, The Charlie Rose Show, Frontline, and blessed Saturday nights of British sitcoms: Black Adder, Mr. Bean, The Thin Blue Line, Keeping Up Appearances, Goodnight Sweetheart, and Father Ted. To this day I have not been party to a single moment of Friends, E.R., CSI, Alias, 24, Law & Order, or any of the Picard-less Star Treks. I wasn’t hipped to Seinfeld or NewsRadio until the syndication stage. My loyalty to network television ended around the moment the cast of Cheers, soused to their stems, altered Jay Leno’s life forever. There was a brief dalliance with ABC’s Cupid, which I watched through a light patch of color-snow. But, like Clerks, that was cancelled before its time, and from then on my TV’s regiment has been limited to videotapes and DVDs. In fact, I haven’t seen a commercial since I fast-forwarded through a bunch on a cassette I borrowed from a friend two years ago. It’s the only way to live. I am the Brandon Tartikoff of my apartment, a role I play with unyielding zeal.
Now, who wants to talk Sopranos?
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