Thursday, February 21, 2008 | by nathan

Cut Off

I like television. I like The Simpsons, still, after all these years, and Saturday Night Live is always more stimulating to me than actually going out on a Saturday night. You won’t ever catch me in the hipster coffee shop talking to all the other hipsters about how television is evil and no one should own one (and not just because I find hipsters to be interminably boring; being not cool is so much more fun). As a philosophy minor I do occasionally worry that television is the embodiment of the shadows on the wall in Plato’s cave, sure, but oh my God, did you see Whitney Houston’s "Kiss My Ass" moment on Being Bobby Brown? You didn’t? Here!

Thing is, despite what I just showed you, I think television is important and sometimes even useful in our culture. I’m especially sensitive to this now that it’s an election year. Beyond that, however, I really believe that television shows, when well-written and thoughtful, contribute something to our culture; they’re a kind of shared storytelling, something we can all take part in and by which we can all be moved.

That said.

Brian and I don’t have cable anymore. It’s a long story, but I’ll just say that we hadn’t planned on not having cable, it just sorta happened one day. We still have our giant television, and can get the basic channels, which we watch in high-definition, and that’s fine. We still have TiVo, which is nice as it gives us the freedom to watch television shows when we want, on our own time, and the ability to skip the mindless commercials which are broadcast at 300 more decibels than the show itself.

When the cable went out unexpectedly, we took stock. We don’t watch very much television - usually the nightly reruns of The Simpsons while we make and eat dinner. I make it a point to catch Lost and Jericho, and am very much looking forward to a new installment of Saturday Night Live this weekend, even if Mike Huckabee is making an appearance.

We talked about it; cable’s nice an all - HGTV and the Food Network and Mythbusters are all great - but is it worth the extra cost? Not really. Not when we’ve got an Apple laptop connected to the television and could theoretically download anything we’re missing from iTunes, which still would be a cost savings over actually paying for cable. Also, with fewer channels through which to mindlessly flip, we find ourselves tuning out more often in order to find better things to do. Remember how I’m writing a novel? Yeah, me too! Oh, and look! The dog wants to be petted! And the kitchen? My god, it’s filthy! The things we’ve been missing!

It’s not a major loss. Though I have to say, I’m completely stoked that the writer’s strike is over and that they got most of what they wanted. Go, writers!