It’s not snobbery; it’s self-preservation.
It started with my first son, who at a tender age would be transfixed by the television for hours, then turn into a brat for the rest of the day.
On one memorable occasion, I watched with him an episode of “Bill Nye The Science Guy.” For those who are unfamiliar, it’s an incredibly fast-paced show with MTV video-style editing, with each episode devote to a single aspect of science. The show we watched was devoted to describing centrifugal force.
After the show, I asked him what it was about. He couldn’t tell me. I asked if he could describe anything we had just watched. He couldn’t.
It was like his memory had been scrubbed clean.
So, when the TV broke, we didn’t bother replacing it and yanked the cable.
This seemed to disturb people. We had relatives offer us their spare sets. My mother, on her death bed, asked if I wanted hers.
We weren’t being radical about it. We just liked the quiet.
Eventually, we acquired another set, and we’ve fallen into the habit of buying DVDs. We get the shows we want to watch, with subtitles (trying watching “The Full Monty” and “Shaun of the Dead” without it), and we don’t have to deal with commercials.
My wife’s folks have cable, and everytime we visit, we watch a bit of the telly, and we’re glad all over again that we don’t subscribe. And at our income, the $600+ a year can buy a lot of DVDs!
But what I find interesting most about this experiment is that, even though we have at least 40+ movies from Disney, Pixar and Looney Tunes, my three kids rarely watch them. It goes in cycles. But they understand that they can decide for themselves what to watch, when they want to. And we’ve found that, cut off from the TV, they demand far less new crap than other kids we know.
