Fall is the most magical time of the year for me. While plenty of autumnal rituals exist to bring me down, like the start of school and the end of summer, there’s one I always look forward to: the start of a brand new television season.
It wasn’t always this way. As a child, visions of sugarplums danced through my head as I looked forward to Christmas. (Actually, it was Ninja Turtles action figures doing the dancing, but that just doesn’t sound as charming.) While I still maintain my materialistic ways, the new television season fills me with a greater sense of hope and wonder than any rational person should feel.
But every year, fall loses a little of excitement. For the last several years, more and more shows have premiered at various times staggered throughout the year. It’s like getting presents for months on end, and as great as that would be, it would sort of cheapen Christmas morning.
There is nothing like finding the next great television show and then hectoring my friends, family, and acquaintances into watching it, or coming back to a show that I’ve stuck with, even though I should’ve given up a long time ago (Heroes, I’m looking at you), and finding that it shows new depth, reminding me why I began watching it in the first place.
Sadly, though, not everyone is as excited about my television habit as I am. Seeing me watch a rerun of Seinfeld after dinner one night, my father asked me how many times I’d seen that episode. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was definitely more than ten. He shook his head, ashamed. I asked what makes me watching a rerun of Seinfeld any different than rereading a book or listening to an album over and over. He didn’t have an answer, and no one I’ve asked since has given me one.
The looks that I get when I mention my television addiction are often filled with derision and accompanied by condescending comments. My all-time favorite is when people say, “Oh, I don’t watch TV anymore,” as if they’re being congratulated for giving up the crack pipe. It is amazing how people assume that because I’m addicted to television, it means that I’m sitting on the edge of my seat watching Maury every morning. I will gladly concede that there is garbage on TV that insults the intelligence and competence of all Americans (Two and a Half Men, I’m looking at you). But there is not a soul who can argue that the same garbage doesn’t exist in print or music. Every medium has a significant low-brow contingent, but no one who has seen an episode of Mad Men, Arrested Development, or The Wire can deny the high art that television can achieve.
In the same way that I can enjoy a vacuous pop song, I occasionally enjoy spending an hour with a trash-tastic show. Feel free to mock, but there are few programs as enjoyable on a week-in, week-out basis as Gossip Girl. It does not claim to be the second coming of the Sopranos, but it fills the same niche as a solid power-pop album. It knows how to hit all the right notes effortlessly.
Like everything else, television is what you make of it. If you want quality programming you have to find it, just like a good book. It has its ups and downs, but that does not justify the abandonment of the medium, or even worse, the feeling of superiority over those who do watch television.
Obviously television has been as large an influence in my life as any other medium to which I’ve been exposed. The desire to give an Aaron Sorkin-written walk and talk or a Sam Waterson closing argument is ever-present in my day-to-day life. I want to have Rob Thomas or Joss Whedon distill everything I say into pop culture zingers. And let’s not even get started on my wish to have constant musical accompaniment in my life. To quote The Simpsons, television has been my “teacher, mother, secret lover.”
