IN 2009 my husband and I dropped our cable carrier, feeling we were paying too much. Before we could find a new one, my husband was laid off, and we decided that our money was best spent on food and rent, especially when Netflix was streaming, and most shows were available online. We’d find a carrier when our future wasn’t so unpredictable.
I’m not being dramatic when I say this was devastating. Television has been the one stable thing throughout my life. It drowned out the sounds of my parents’ impending divorce; it muffled roommates’ romantic escapades. But, more important, it was a crucial tool of escape and catharsis, exactly what I needed when our financial future was at risk.
Our options narrowed from a world of entertainment to the whims of the few channels that would deign to come clearly through what are essentially newfangled rabbit ears: a high-definition digital antenna intended to capture the over-the-air signal, which was once how everyone watched TV. Sure, some shows were online, but in the beginning the number of commercials in them seemed prohibitive. We’d just come from a paradise of DVR fast-forwarding. Now we had to sit through the same ad over and over? We also had only one computer; with two writers in the family, it wasn’t available for TV watching.
We quickly learned some lessons. Would “Mad Men” still run if we couldn’t watch it? (Yes.) Would people refrain from spoilers while “Breaking Bad” made its way to streaming? (No, they would not.) What was this “Walking Dead” everyone was talking about? (Still not sure, but apparently it’s a big deal.)
When the weather is right, we get most of the channels. Sometimes. CBS is the only network that shows up consistently and pristinely, and one day I’ll be old enough to enjoy its fare. There is also a channel that doesn’t seem to have a name but broadcasts reruns of “Three’s Company” or “Sanford and Son,” which is not so bad in the beggars/choosers category.
Yet what initially seemed like a torture we’d simply have to endure became a surprising reminder of the simple pleasures of simple TV.
Call it Slow TV. I had never stopped loving TV, but I had stopped appreciating it. Entire seasons of shows had piled up on the DVR, on the theory that they might be interesting someday. TV was everywhere now — on the phone, on the computer. It was on while I wrote, did taxes, folded laundry. It was background noise. When I really had to make choices about what to watch, and then pay attention with no rewind to fall back on, TV became absorbing again, an activity in itself, as it had been when I was younger. And I watched much less, if only for logistical reasons.
As it turns out, I unintentionally had become part of a growing group of Americans giving up wired cable and even televisions. Nielsen recently reported that TV set ownership has dropped to 96.7 percent of American households from 98.9 percent, and it isn’t because we’re reading more. Instead we’re cobbling together new ways of digesting programming. We watch on iPhones, computers, Rokus, other people’s HBO Go accounts, and yes, a digital antenna; one-size-fits-all TV is over.
Still, analog watching isn’t without its inconveniences. Even in the heady days of cable service, the DVR was overwhelmed by the choices on some nights. The answer should have been simple: Watch some shows online when the computer is available. But “Gossip Girl,” for instance, had so many unforwardable commercials on Hulu that it’s clear who the real demographic for those shows are: people who don’t yet believe that they have the right to not be advertised to for 30 minutes of a 60-minute show. When the ads became burdensome, the series had to do some mighty things to stay on the list. Blair’s marrying a prince, then leaving him for Chuck, simply didn’t qualify.
A return to as-it-happens TV is also a reminder of the annoyance of learning that there’s a rerun when you didn’t expect it. The monthlong wait for a new “Revenge,” which was delivering fresh installments in the fall but grew spotty as the season wore on, seemed interminable. There was the sinking realization that, sigh, this wasn’t a new one, or worse, that there was some kind of news or reality special in its place.
And in this online-watching, DVR-heavy, pause-happy culture, the phone always seemed to ring during pivotal scenes.
Worst of all was arranging my schedule around TV. There once was a time when no one would ask you to do anything on a Thursday night. “Seinfeld” was on! Now, with the timetable made so irrelevant by digital recording, it was hard to explain why a book club on Monday nights wouldn’t work. Not while “Smash” was still on the air, no sirree, Bob.
But slowly the advantages of Slow TV began to outweigh these problems. First, while swallowing a season whole is a lot of fun — as with Showtime’s “Homeland,” which I did because I got a press screener — some shows (and maybe even “Homeland”) benefit from a weeklong wait. The anxiety of a cliffhanger could have me reeling for days. It might be that these shows are best watched with breaks between episodes to build suspense. Think back to the six-week arc of Bobby Simone’s slow and awful death on “NYPD Blue” in 1998. That was six weeks of gloom in which you could get so enmeshed in a character’s fate that it began to affect your soul.
And there is nothing to make a person focus like knowing there’s no pause or repeat. Yes, a DVR can reduce an hourlong show to 40 minutes, but mostly it lets the show linger for hours, or days. Pausing to get something to eat or to remind your spouse about a bill isn’t how the writers want you to watch their work; it also isn’t how to get the most out of it. What is so interesting about Slow TV, in the end, is that the screen that we so often accuse of outsourcing our mindfulness became a source of actual mindfulness.
We have two computers at home now, one easily hooked up to the TV monitor. (Note to Netflix: Exactly when is the fifth season of “Mad Men” going to start streaming? Tick tock.) But I am still lost in the sweet haze of intimacy I have found again with television. So maybe we’ll keep ourselves cable free.
Or maybe not. We’re both gainfully employed now, and there are a million reasons to get cable again, along with a DVR. Maybe three years is long enough.
And God, I do miss “Gossip Girl.” I was flipping through the channels the other day, and Dan was kissing Blair. Dan and Blair! Can you imagine?
Television: Life Without Cable TV? Not Such a Tragedy
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Television: Life Without Cable TV? Not Such a Tragedy
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Television: Life Without Cable TV? Not Such a Tragedy
