We normally keep our TV in the basement, our cold basement. Even after replacing the windows and furnace, and having new lights installed to brighten the place, that basement family room has never worked very well. Christine decided we should bring the TV upstairs for the next few months, since we aren’t having anyone over right now. Honestly, we didn’t have a lot of visitors before the pandemic, but now we have an excuse for our isolation.
As I walk and drive around Orem, it's clear that there are two types of TV watchers--those who keep the TV in the upstairs living room and those who don't. This probably is determined by the size of one’s house and other factors. Some people keep the TV above the fireplace. That would be physically painful, to stare up at it. I Googled up the ideal distance and height for our set.
Someone once said that telling people you don't watch TV is the easiest way there is to be an elitist. I'm sure that TV habits are shaped by our backgrounds and demographic. I also know that at some point binging television shifted from something shameful to something you can almost humble brag about, like being really busy, or working too hard.
So because I accidentally cut our TV antenna coax that led to the antenna I had put on the chimney, I went to Walmart tonight and bought their highest-rated antenna, which cost $10. On the way into the store I saw someone with a 65-inch TV balanced on their cart, headed to checkout, and smiled behind my mask. Maybe it's because the TV is upstairs, but that flat, black antenna works as well as our chimney signal grabber. I think we get about 30 channels, including CBS, home of the Superbowl, which I rarely watch but will tomorrow because Tom Brady is 40-something and is dragging his team to a possible championship.
Our Roku TV plays a neat trick. As you approach the end of the broadcast HD channels, it switches over seamlessly to something called "The Roku Channel" and begins streaming free content over the wifi as if it were showing you actual cable channels. In the midst of the detritus was James Dean in East of Eden, Colombo episodes and “Rat Patrol” which I have never seen but remember from an old paperback.
Every time we travel, we watch cable TV in the hotel and marvel at how strange and terrible it is as we are assaulted by unfamiliar advertisements.. As I sat on our couch and plowed through channel after channel of terrible television it felt like I was traveling again, which I guess is part of the appeal, being transported out of this constrained pandemic life, forgetting the fading friendships and trying not to think about the unfathomable pain attached to almost 500,000 deaths. My father passed away, expectedly, over six years ago and I'm still trying to make sense of who he was, and wishing I could tell him things I've learned. We’ve been separated from our friends before, when we went to live in Qatar for two years, and you want to think that everything returns to normal when you return, but as one of our expat friends told me, “People forget about you, they move on with their lives, and nothing is quite the same when you get back.”
Eventually I gave up on broadcast television and went to YouTube, where I was told by a helpful algorithm I could watch "That Thing You Do," whose title track was written by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne, who died from Covid nine months ago, so hearing that song was bittersweet. My daughter and I ended up watching the entire movie and staying up way too late. My daugher is sixteen, and we have never spontaneously watched a movie together. Moving that TV upstairs changed the way we watched it, and will probably affect our family in other ways we can't predict. My wife and I are always trying to think of ways to bring our remaining children closer, but we can feel them straining to leave us.
Director Barry Levinson's Baltimore (1990) tells the story of an immigrant family and their relationship and ends with a sad shot of an alienated, dispersed family eating off of TV trays while watching television. Roger Ebert, an underrated essayist, wrote:
“‘Avalon’ is often a warm and funny film, but it is also a sad one, and the final sequence is heartbreaking. It shows the way in which our modern families, torn loose of their roots, have left old people alone and lonely--warehoused in retirement homes. The story of the movie is the story of how the warmth and closeness of an extended family is replaced by alienation and isolation. The title of the film comes from the name of the Baltimore neighborhood where the family first settled. In Celtic mythology, Avalon was an island of blessed souls, an earthly paradise somewhere in the Western seas. Who would think, sailing for it, that they would fall off the edge of the earth?"
So I guess it remains to be seen whether this television set will occasionally draw us together during this dark, unseasonably warm pandemic winter, or whether we will ignore it and go back to staring at our phones, tablets and laptops in our separate rooms, waiting for spring, for life to begin again.