I don’t watch a lot of TV simply because I rarely have a lot of time.
However, it seems to me that, recently (as in the last decade or so), there has been more really good shows for adults than ever before - stuff like Breaking Bad and The Wire. So there is more actual reason to watch TV now than in the past.
There is of course also tons of trash, but what with modern technology, one isn’t forced to watch trash because that’s just what’s on at the time, as in the past.
Thank you NitroPress. Sometimes people just can’t handle the truth.
I don’t think of people who doesn’t watch TV as snobs. When they start getting all snobby about it then I think of them as snobs. Now that I’ve thought and written snobs a couple of times I find it is a funny word.
Keep weeping. For your tears taste of sweet snozberries.
I watch TV. My favourite part of having NetFlix are the documentaries. Even topics that I have read about intensively, the documentaries can take me to a time and place that I can only imagine in my mind.
The one that comes to mind the most is the West. It is a miniseries about the U.S. settlement in the west and what happened to the native population as a result. Now, I will grant you that I am a Canuck and new little about the subject going in but I learned more from seeing all the photos and the modern footage of the still untamed areas of that part of the country than I would have reading any book.
Granted, now that I have that spark of interest, I have read more on the subject to become moderately knowledgeable but just reading never would have touched me in the same way.
Also, I watch one hour of completely mindless TV a night (followed by 20 minutes of mindless reading). It lets my brain (which is what I use to make my living) to shut down and decompress so I am able to get to sleep. I actually find it fun.
How did THAT come about?! When I was a kid, I had no say in what was on if there was an adult in the room. That’s actually a big part of why I don’t watch much - if my family wanted to watch something I didn’t like, I went to my room and read a book, so my formative years didn’t include much tv watching.
The one I found particularly enlightening was recommended to me by a Doper - Ken Burns’ Civil War mini-series. I thought it was absolutely riveting and I learned so much from it that I was compelled to investigate the topic on my own. Subjects like that just easily lend themselves to visual media.
Oh hay, that’s all nice and good, but your show is back on. Derp derp the fuck derp.
This thread is a surprise to me. I didn’t realize there was so much snobbery in NOT watching TV. I posted in the other thread that now I can’t find, but hope no one took the wrong way. I rarely watch TV because there just isn’t much that I like, and because I tend to have a short attention span. If someone asks me, “Did you see (show I don’t watch) last night?” I answer that I don’t watch it, I don’t say I don’t watch TV. I occasionally watch HGTV or Food Network, and I saw an ad for a show on Neanderthals on PBS tonight that I hope I don’t forget to watch. Other than that, sitcoms, drama and “reality” just don’t hold my interest. I certainly don’t judge people for what or how much they watch (although those Housewives shows strain that). Heck, I constantly play a dumb little time-wasting computer game called Fishdom, so who am I to judge?? LOL.
Because everything is according to a schedule! OH NOES! I’ll miss days of our lives.
Plus sometimes you just want something a little bit more mindless. I read anywhere from 4-88 books a month. I know this for a fact because I buy 4 books a month on the Kindle and usually finish them all by the middle of the month (reading slow, too. Sigh.) Then I have to re-read some or get more from the library.
Then, too, I am going back to school.
Plus I work 40 hours a week. And I have something of a social life - not much, but it’s there.
So at the end of all this I am to be begrudged because I watch an episode of TNG every night, and get DVDs approximately once a week.
It’s uninformed crap like this that leads to the OP’s question.
I don’t watch TV, read books or magazines, have friends or partake in any hobbies. Most days I don’t leave the bed. I’m cooler than all y’all.
The short attention span thing applies to me too…just passively sitting for an hour makes me all twitchy. The internet is different because it’s interactive and I can jump from one thing to another, or wander off and do something else then come back.
Also keeping a TV on “for noise or company” is a concept beyond me…I don’t mind silence. I like it, actually.
I don’t think watching TV is a completely worthless activity, though. There’s plenty of worthwhile content on TV. And it can be nice to just sit and veg out in front of something mindless once in a while. I’m a hospice volunteer and about once a week I spend 3-4 hours with a mostly-comatose old lady. The TV is always on and I enjoy vegging out watching stupid shows then.
I haven’t owned a TV in about a decade though (except a brief 6-month stint in the mid-2000s) and probably won’t again. Anyway, most shows and movies available online. When people start talking about Dancing With the Stars or The Bachelor or what someone said on The View I just tune out. Because I seriously do not care.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt superior or snobbish about it though.
There’s a type, some of whom are in this thread, who see not watching TV as the moral high ground. It’s odd, because if someone told you that they never listen to music, go to movies, or read a book, you would think they were dolts, but somehow the idea that you aren’t consuming media through a device called a TV makes you Marshall McLuhan.
There’s crap tv and there’s crap movies, crap music, crap theater, and crap books. If you have to demonstrably write off an entire medium because you can’t discern the good from the bad, you are the definition of a snob.
For me, it’s mostly about the commercials–the sheer quantity of them that drove me away from “live” television. There was once a legal limit to the amount of commercials that could be broadcast each hour. Ronald Reagan did away with that. As mentioned in an earlier post, once upon a time advertising supported the programming. Now, programming is just a vehicle for advertising. I have a healthy attention span and having an otherwise enjoyable program chopped into little disconnected pieces by commercials became just too annoying. Now, I’m used to viewing the programs I watch with the commercials cut or minimized online.
I’ve noticed something else, though. When I’ve been away from watching TV for a long time and happen to turn it on, it’s mostly unwatchable. I’m talking about the typical regularly scheduled weekly shows, especially sitcoms. There is something about the style of them that is just unappealing. I don’t know if it’s the dialog, the lighting, the laugh track, the camera angles. Whatever it is, it just screams “TV” and turns me off–so I turn it off.
I do Netflixs mainly on a weekend evening but I really don’t have the time to invest in TV shows. Don’t get any reception where I live and don’t care enough to get a dish or cable. Could care less if you watch it though. Makes me no never mind. Your life,your choice as to what you do with your spare time.
Oh, it’s more informed that I think you can possibly imagine. It’s just not informed by trying to out-watch the watchbirds. You don’t have to be dying of cancer to be an expert on the topic.
And what’s the truth here?
I don’t watch TV because I can just stream stuff on demand, minus adverts and other crap, and I’ve always (since I was around 11-12) done it that way. To know something worth watching was on TV, I’d have to have it on and see an advert or read a TV guide every week. No snobbery or bragging intended, I just don’t enjoy 99% of what’s on TV.
I certainly agree that this meme predated the Onion by a lot. But in the very early days of TV only relatively well to do people could afford one, and there was a lot more cultural programming than there was later. When it became more affordable the average quality went down. However I’ve been watching “Have Gun Will Travel” from the late 1950s, and in one of the shows you missed the whole point if you were not familiar with Oscar Wilde and his famous quotes.
Newton Minow’s famous “Vast Wasteland” speed was from 1962, so since that time TV has been seen to be mostly junk.
With cable you can broadcast narrowly again, and the TV critics I’ve been reading seem to think this is more or less a golden age, certainly when compared to the '60s. How anyone can say “it is all junk” when The Wire exists is beyond me.
SDMB, London, around 1600.
Theater has now gotten to be garbage. The seats are filled with yahoos, (yes I know) the plays are full of dirty jokes and bawdy humor, and the actors are one step above criminals - barely. There is nothing on stage worth watching!