Everybody Loves Raymond Apparently

Last night, the Emmys proclaimed that Everybody Loves Raymond and of course, The West Wing. The networks would like you to believe Everybody Loves TV, but once you get into blogging and IRC and IM and email, I think something snaps and your attention span for TV dwindles to near zero.

Wait, I guess I do watch a few things, I watch CNBC to catch some business news. I watch CSPAN to keep up with political stuff. I watch ... well, with my son, I watch a little Nickelodeon, some Cartoon Network, but mostly pray he doesn't ask me to sit down and watch, because I can't stand sitting there passively, letting it suck my eyeballs out and not letting me "get" any information from it.

Here's what the other online media have made me feel about TV -- bored, frustrated and ansy since I just can't put my hands through the screen and pull out wonderful stuff, the way I can online. When I'm online and I read something interesting, I can take off on a deep dive for lots more information within seconds. When someone says something interesting on TV (this happens about once every 3 weeks), I can't go on an instantaneous hunt. I can't get INSIDE it. There's nothing in there, and it doesn't WANT me in there asking more questions.

That's the weird feeling I get from TV -- "You, just sit there, don't ask us anything, don't think, and YOU, hey, you, go buy some crap we're advertising." Dead, dead, dead.

I suppose Tivo (which people still rave about) helps one feel they are more engaged with the boob tube, but still, it's so thin a medium, what's there that's worth getting anyway?

I even detest the "posture" you must assume as a TV viewer, as compared to an online participant. You all know the drill, come home, tired out, drop your stuff by the door, flop onto the couch, nearly supine, flick on the tube, eat some dreadful food, drink something bad for you. You look like a wounded soldier watching TV in terms of body position -- or the overused "couch potato" although even that suggests a certain rooted earthiness TV watchers rarely exhibit. Gives potatoes a bad name. The online "viewer" is active -- thus the name "surfer" -- a body full of energy, strength, engagement, split-second interaction. A surfer is alert, poised to tear off in any direction, on a wave, on a hunt, digging up info, zipping from here to there, linking in a flash to this or that new thought. Interactive is a good term. You are connecting -- the "inter" part -- and you are much more energetic -- the "active" part.

I wonder if there's any going back. I can barely stand to turn the thing on, even when I'm alone, it hardly makes me feel better, actually makes me feel worse. Between terrorism and war, it's also become "The Bad News Box" in my psyche.

One last thing that seems just plain embarrassing about TV. Most of the stories are so pathetically "manufactured" and overproduced. They take a plain homey little hurricane, some nice girl from south of the border named Isabel and they have to turn her into a Femme Fatale of weather. It's now standard fare. Take some 5 second clip of a guy running away from some police cars on a highway and play it 800 times in 8 minutes and turn it into ... whatever the hell they decide. Take some politician, hint at some dastardly deed he's done, make it into this minute's scandal, sell some diapers, sell some toaster pastry, more at 11:00 but by 11:00, the fickleness of TV always wins out and the old scandal is over and some new junk is taking its place, the networks helping reinforce the notion that ALL their stories are made-up, bogus and completely biodegradable.

But I'm not being fair. There has been one major improvement in TV lately. At last, the medium fits the message. With the new flat panel displays, we can literally see TV in its actual depth -- wafer thin.