Love/Hate

I have a love/hate relationship with our television.  OK, it's mostly hate.  In the early years, I tried to persuade my husband to rid our house of television altogether. He grew up with all-you-can-eat cartoons on Saturday mornings and turned out OK, so he didn't see the rationale. In fact, he thought I was a crunchy granola-coated nut.  We compromised on "basic" cable -- the kind where you don't get any of the good stations but don't have to use bunny ears -- and a demilitarized zone of television has existed in uneasy truce in our home ever since. 

My kids' TV universe (aside from SEC football, which doesn't really count) is pretty much  limited to PBS Kids. This isn't so much a sign of my moral superiority as a selfish desire to avoid the whining associated with commercials and my general snooty attitude that TV rots your brain.  My school age kids have moved on to thirty year old BBC versions of the Chronicles of Narnia, in which the talking animals appear to be wearing bathroom rugs with zippers up the back, and the occasional Pixar movie if it's not "too scary".  Things that are Too Scary include the two foot tall bad guy in The Incredibles. Overexposure to graphic violence is not a big problem at our house. 

We were existing quite well like this until Bill Cosby entered our lives.  The Cosby Show was a family tradition for me in the 1980s.  Once a week on Thursday 7pm Central Standard Time, my family gathered around the TV and watched the Huxtables along with whatever the ad agencies chose to sell us that week.  The Cosby Show occupies space in my brain near hot cocoa, warm blankets and 7Up when your stomach is upset.  I picked up the first couple of seasons on DVD as an impulse buy, thinking my husband would like to watch them with me (he didn't, his cocoa-and-7Up neurons apparently being wired differently).  One evening when the mental energy to parent all the way through til bedtime was lacking, I randomly offered the kiddos "sofa snuggle time" to watch an episode with me.  Turns out, they think it's hysterical. Something about that family (maybe just the insane number of children) clicks for them. Even the two year old talks about the "Co-bee Sow", although his actual attention wanders after five minutes.   

I have no idea what my parents watched on TV as kids, other than Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.  I know there WAS television in the '50s and '60s, but without the preservative effect of DVDs and steaming video, it was long gone by the time I reached viewing age.  As a member of the network TV-saturated generation X, sharing my favorite programs from childhood with my children is a way of anchoring them.  It's like a time machine that lets them get a glimpse, in a way that children of previous generations never could, of the cultural influences that shaped their mom and dad into the strange adult beings they are today.  I know that one day they'll venture out into the larger world of kids who have X Boxes and REAL cable and smartphones, and those friends will say "you watched what?" and the secret will be out that our family entertainment isn't cool.  But until then, we'll keep soaking in the 80s, commercial-free.