The Fall of the Mighty Television Set
In the long ago Halcyon days of the home theater, we were connected by “must see TV” and serialized dramas, the Nightly News and the “movie of the week.” We socialized around them, made dinner end just in time, or ate over tray tables in front of the set on the oversized family sofa. When the opening chords of the show’s theme came on, we knew every word and it ear wormed us into several conversations we were bound to have the next day.
Keep the leg warmers and overdone eyeliner of my misspent 1980s youth when men wore mullets and women, combustible amounts of hairspray, as long as you can find a way to turn the television on with one easy button, I’ll revert to the huge cube with a 12 inch screen dwarfed inside faux wood-paneling.
My earliest memories were a resigned grumbling as one of us hoisted ourselves from the recliner to change the channel. More often than not, we got the ubiquitous static. The family then embarked upon the “adjustment” of the rabbit ears and antenna, while we looked to connect to microwaves, or radio waves, or gamma rays — whatever formed the picture on the screen. It emerged through the static or it didn’t. Watching it while it was broadcast was our only option.
The huge cube’s innards consisted of woofers and tweeters that a dedicated television repairman would fix when not even my mother’s righteous slap on its side could catch that vertical hold.
My family was too cheap for the Betamax beginnings, but went all in on the Videocassette Recorder. Programming the VCR was a specialized skill only my mom learned, and she curated recorded selections at home with a glee commensurate to a burgeoning digital world. Ecstatic, she’d fast forward through the commercials of Dallas and Dynasty. Those TDKs were separated from those with the games she recorded for my dad while he did his best to avoid spoilers until we got home.
By the time the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, we’d moved to the 10th floor of a building with a cable hook-up on its roof. A Pandora’s box of good times awaited us. It even came with HBO! My sister and I thrilled every time the bellicose music blared and the camera ran through the streets of the fake miniature city as an introduction to movies we watched whenever they were playing that month.
My husband and I met while I was living in the city of angels and he was inside, but unaware of, the decadent bubble of the Silicon Valley 1990s. He was my person, even if he preferred the news over my own bent towards time traveling, tear jerking storytelling. I liked my fiction to be made up, not presented as reality morphed through a well-produced lens. Even when it came from Ted Koppel’s Nightline. Which we both loved.
The new century brought advanced technology and children. I relegated the VCR to an oversized clock stand for the television. Thankfully, the Lion King reissue coincided with our upgrade to DVDs, because my oldest would have Hakuna Matata’d his way to a warped Circle of Life in no time.
I now had three remotes. One for the DVD player. One for the box. And a mysterious one that, as far as I knew, was set up only as a decoy to confuse me further.
As the boys matured, they needed to watch every football game each Sunday, the NBA finals and every game of the World Cup. So the trouble began.
As parents, we made up for our lack of actual athletic interest with the purchase of a 25 inch flat screen and a satellite dish with over 700 channels, which made the whole get up mostly unwatchable.
Still again, I switched to HD and a DVR on our ever widening, but thinning set. In a fit of genius, my husband finally velcro’ed the remotes to the couch and then attached them with a wire, another life hack that made me grateful to have chosen him all those years before.
Moving up to a 47 inch flat screen, I stood in awe as it was mounted against the wall, text book thin. But I should have seen the train wreck coming, the moment I was offered a Roku. Between that, Apple TV, and a Fire Stick, along with some interface the television itself begs me to use! It’s too much, too late!
It has already been written. We can barely be expected to operate it. The kids prefer three minutes on apps inside tiny screens, not at all interested in the tremendous monolith taking up half my living room wall.
What good is it when the revolution is televised if I can’t figure out where it’s streaming or which HDMI to switch to?
Is it too much to ask Gail King to show up on my set for her 7:00am eye opener? Bleary eyed and frustrated I surrender to my coffee and sit down with my phone. Look, she has a podcast I can listen to! Just like a radio.
Can I summon the video and watch it on demand? Touch it? Oh, I can “mirror” it directly onto the dying wall art. I see. In that case, to be continued…
