Elena is a graduate student. She watches television every weekday morning—Canada AM. So most mornings, Barbara Coloroso instructs her on how to raise and discipline the children that she doesn’t have, Rod Black updates her on the professional sports that she doesn’t follow, Ben Mulroney reviews films she doesn’t have the time or inclination to see…and yet she watches.
Between “content segments,” she is bombarded with advertisements for cars, Viagra, Pfizer pharmaceuticals (for diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer), McDonald’s and Disneyland. She owns no car and has no intention of buying one, she has no complaints about her sex life or health, she hasn’t been to McDonald’s in three years and she hasn’t been to Disneyland in fourteen. Nothing could reflect her day-to-day life and needs less. Yet, still, she watches. Why is that?
God Bless America!
In the 21st century, where do we look to for the answers to puzzling questions? The United States of America, of course. And, conveniently enough, the USA offers us a helpful example in the form of citizen Edward Bello. No, Bello does not explain why people watch television, but he does clarify why people have a right to watch television. In fact, he has proven that Americans have the constitutional right to watch television.
Bello was initially arrested and convicted in New York City of credit card fraud. He pleaded guilty and his sentence was 10 months of house arrest without television. Sounds like he got off easy, right? The thing is, earlier this year he challenged the constitutionality of his television ban and won. That’s right, a judge found that Bello had a First Amendment right to watch television. (As it turns out, the right to free expression doesn’t count for much if no one is free to pay attention.)
Meanwhile, writers from Detroit to Miami have lined up to take potshots at him. And why not? This is a pre-packaged joke and the punchline is the story itself. A constitutional right to watch television? That’s ridiculous, most of them say. This man pleaded guilty; what kind of rights should he enjoy? Others wryly note that if he had been sent to prison, he would have been free to watch television.
Only one would-be-pundit, that I know of, has taken the opposing view. In the Houston Chronicle, Leonard Pitts argues that, sure, a right to watch television sounds silly, but would you feel the same way if instead of television it was books, newspapers, and websites that were being restricted? Which is an excellent point, highlighting two significant things: First, how incredibly important television is and what a large part of our lives it has become. Second, despite all that, how insignificant we still think it is.
As I’ve said, none of this tells us why we watch. But it does kind of suggest why finding out might be a really important thing.
I don’t know why I watch television. I am not alone.
I’ve asked a few people about this, and their answers aren’t that surprising: We don’t really know why we watch television.
I watch it for entertainment (almost everyone says), I don’t watch it passively (most people say), I watch it critically (some people say), I watch it when I’m eating alone (most people say)… and one person even vaguely recalls hearing “scientists” say that a body watching television is in a lower state of relaxation than a body that is asleep. But the general consensus seems to be this: We watch television just because. Period. And it is okay to watch it for all of the reasons (excuses?) listed above: because it is entertaining, because I don’t do it passively, because I am critical, because “scientists” have explained it all to me in a clear and articulate way.
Melodrama revealed at Teen Ink dot-com
Of course, as any good reporter knows, if direct questions don’t work, you just have to know where to find direct answers. No, I am not thinking of experts here. The sociologists, anthropologists and pop-apologists are just as clueless as to why we watch television. No, direct answers will only be found at a place whose stock and trade are answers of the direct variety.
Enter Teenink.com, a Massachusetts website where teens post stories on anything that interests them (mostly themselves). And this, of course, is the perfect place to find the real dirt. If you want to know why anyone would watch Party of Five, you need look no further than someone like Massachusetts teen Therese P.
As a Party of Five devotee, Therese explains why “we” watch. “We watch Bailey, a heart-warming high school senior, endure incredible hardships, including the death of his girlfriend to a drug overdose and the experience of almost paralysing a team-mate in a freak football accident.” Wow, that explains it all!
The trouble with this candid—and more than a little embarrassing—celebration of hokey melodrama is that it is probably as good an explanation as any. In the dense wilderness of prime-time, Party of Five is probably—gasp—one of the more thoughtful shows. And yet we must endure great losses, drug overdoses, family deaths and freak footballing accidents. Is this your life? It certainly isn’t mine.
There is just never a good time to stop watching
What you are reading right now used to be two entire paragraphs about Aristotle’s Poetics and the notion of catharsis, great people in exceptional circumstances, etc. I just deleted all that pretentious crud—and good riddance. Instead, I’m going to tell you what Arron said to me. Arron watched General Hospital every week most of the way through her undergraduate degree in zoology. She covers the same territory that Aristotle did, mostly. What she has to say is a bit more interesting, though, more up-to-date and probably more to the point.
If television is really all about melodrama, about being entertained yet remaining critical (though I am sure that it must be about many, many other things) than soap operas would seem to be the high-art form of the medium. Being entertained yet remaining critical has never been this easy.
So what does Arron say about them? “Soap operas are for women what WWF wrestling is for men. It’s fantasy. It’s stupidity. There is absolutely no way that it’s real. Soap operas don’t make any sense. At all!” Yet still she watches. (Though since completing her degree and taking on a busy 60-hour work week, she has stopped watching General Hospital specifically.) And Arron explains this by saying, quite simply, that she was addicted. By way of explanation, she offers an insight that could easily explain television watching generally.
“They write [soap operas] so that people become addicted to them,” says Arron. “There is more than one plot line going on at a time, all the time. And they make them so that when one is boring the other is exciting—when the other one quiets down for a bit, they will make the first one exciting again—so there is never an optimum time to stop watching because you always want to know what is going to happen next.”
How many of us—the general viewer/non-studio audience—would say that television isn’t interesting at any one given time, but that it can be, or it will be, or that it is sure to be more interesting on some other channel we haven’t checked, or don’t get, or can’t be bothered to check just now? How many of us just follow it because we started following it (whatever “it” was)? How many of us watch because there is just never an optimum time to stop watching?
The names in this article have been altered to protect the innocent, except Edward Bello’s. He, of course, is a dirty rotten criminal who should be sent to his room without television.
