The End of Television Watching

Of all the developments in my personal life to come out of the recent shutdown, none is more surprising to me than the fact that, after a lifetime of doing so, I no longer watch broadcast or cable television.

Like many my age, I grew up watching television. During the 1970s the television set was turned on every evening in our home. Watching television with my grandparents at their houses, on weekend nights, forms many of my childhood memories. My paternal grandfather was a naturalist, and as a child I thought he and Marlin Perkins were essentially the same person.

At earlier phases of my life I would have thought it impossible to be connected to the outside world without television. Watching the evening news was a nightly ritual, or even more importantly, staying up to see how the late night comedians talked and joked about the news. It was important not only to know the news, but to know what other people thought about it. It seemed the only way to feel as if one were part of ongoing national conversation. I understand well those who are still in thrall to the old media this way, even as I see how narrow and manipulated that conversation always has been.

Television has become the preferred way of bonding with other people, and I was no exception. On the playground of elementary school, one talked about episodes of one's favorite shows, comparing notes about the storylines. It wasn't until I went away to college that I took any significant break from daily watching, and even then I would seek out the television lounges at my schools for anything that was important to watch.

So many hours of my life have been spent watching broadcast sporting events in the physical presence of others, overwhelmingly football.  I treasure the fun memory of watching the 1998 Super Bowl with my roommate in Austin, after many years of us both suffering together as Denver Broncos fans. I still text him about the NFL from time to time.

My late father used to take me to the Iowa State football games on campus when he was finishing his degree and when we lived in married student housing. The Cyclones were usually awful back then and lost every big game, as they still tend to do, especially when they were on television. So the memory of savoring the triumph of my own alma mater at end of the 2006 Rose Bowl as I watched it with him on their living room television in Fort Collins will always be one of my favorites to recollect. He was sitting in almost the exact spot where he would draw his last breath in hospice almost ten years to the day after that. I get tears in my eyes thinking how I almost didn't come downstairs to watch the end of that game with him.

Throughout the years, television (and to a lesser extent public radio) was a companion in times of isolation, especially when I grew into middle age and lived alone. Of course there was TCM, which I watched constantly when I lived alone for two years in Colorado, and which I sought out specifically when I lived out of hotels on the road. I have written extensively about this in this blog. Among other things, it made me feel as if I belonged to a community of movie lovers.

All that is gone, or at least it has been gone for the last four months. We still turn on the television---the old 27-inch flatscreen I bought at an electronics outlet in the Portland suburbs so we could watch the 2014 Winter Olympics. But since March our television has been turned on only briefly in the evening, and it has been configured since that time to receive its HDMI input not from the cable box, as it normally would, but from a Google Chromecast device.

Most evenings we use Chromecast to watch Youtube videos that I have queued up on my iPad (this is a far better method of watching Youtube videos than the clunky Youtube firmware interface that is built in to most televisions these days). The videos are typically ones that I might have run across during the day, which I have saved to the "Watch Later" folder in my account. I should note that I do shell out twelve ninety-five a month to Youtube for a premium account, so that we never have to watch any of the sponsored advertisements that would interrupt these videos when viewed with a free account. It is money well spent.

Almost none of these videos we watch come from mainstream media outlets, except when we watched the daily Presidential press briefings almost daily during the height of the recent health emergency, or when, more broadly, we watch one of the President's many campaign rallies, which we both greatly enjoy, including the most recent one he held in Tulsa.

In my opinion the President is, among many other things, one of the most engaging speakers in the history of media. Each one of his speeches is unique, with long extemporaneous segments in the manner of live television commentary or stand-up comedy. His intelligence shines forth in these moments, as does his manifest love for our nation and all its people, even the ones who detest him and would not vote for him. The audience is always joyous and plays along---the exact opposite of the characterizations I've heard so often from progressives, most of whom cannot stomach watching more than the tiniest clip from one of these rallies.

The President is a tremendously funny man, albeit in the style of straight comedian. To me he is worth all the late night comic pundits on other side combined, the ones who are helpless without a teleprompter of jokes written for them, and who have foundered badly in the post-shutdown world as people have seen the narrow scope of their talent. I pity the folks, even on our side, who are caught up in the President's surface-level persona of the "bad boy" that the President himself has so meticulously crafted, and continues to use so effectively within Pop Culture to so much benefit of the nation and the world. To put it in clear terms, they confuse the President with the character he has played in the Pop Culture Reality Show for the last forty years.  But he has wanted it that way.

Even for these live big-event videos, however, we often watch them not via an established media network, the ones you might think we'd use, and which Youtube pushes in its suggestions, but rather via one of upstart Internet-based channels that have become David-and-Goliath threats to the media giants. Of course if the mainstream media mentions these tiny competitors at all, it is to excoriate them as hate spewers which ought to be banished from the Internet.

Besides these speeches, however, and special one-off events like the recent launch of the SpaceX rocket, lately our primary ritual in the evening consists of my curating a selection of the various lesser-known and "nobody" Youtubers to whom I prefer to give my attention. We tend to watch many of our same favorite users from day to day, to the point of memorizing their theme music intros as one did with a Seventies sitcom. But each evening's playlist tends to have a great deal of variation in the line-up and order, depending on our mood.

Each evening after dinner I sit down and draw out my iPad to play programming director. We usually start with the hard news of the day, often provided by recorded live streams made by some of the emerging alternative commentators. These include the ones on our side, as well as the middle-ground ones who try to be fair to both sides in the war, even if they don't see eye-to-eye with our side. They typically read from news stories on their web browser and discuss it with other people in their home studio environment, or in response to live comments from people watching the video.  From this, as with my Twitter feed, I get a good overview of the opinions being expressed in the mainstream news as well, since much of the commentary is in reaction to it.

After the hard news we usually move onto entertainment news. There is a group of Youtubers I very much like, most of them well known to each other but unknown to the public at large, who make videos about the state of recent movie releases, streaming television services, and other Pop Culture phenomena.  They also report on insider news, leaks from studios, and rumors from production sets. Of course I don't watch movies or television anymore, and we don't subscribe to any streaming services (we tried them but found little we ever wanted to watch besides some food shows) so this is how I keep up with the meta-information about the "Influence Industry" that Hollywood has morphed into.

They also report on computer gaming, and I watch many of these videos as well, even though I do not play computer games at all, and have no intention of devoting even a minute of time to playing them. It happens that computer gaming is pretty much the last industry standing in Hollywood that is making money, and so one can learn a lot about the fast-moving state of our culture through the news about it.  As the Youtubers themselves would explain, this is partly because gaming is the last Hollywood-based industry that doesn't completely hate much of its audience, and (with some notable exceptions) doesn't need to hammer social messages into them at every turn.

Suffice it to say that among these Youtubers I mention, whether hard news or entertainment oriented, they universally fall into the category of folks who, although perhaps not outright enthusiastic supporters of the President the way I am, are at least the type who would not consider me to be an awful person simply because of my politics.

They all know full well what it is like to be constantly attacked by the other side as an -ist or a -phobe for any minor deviation from the progressive party line, until those words lose their meaning. This fact about them disqualifies them from consideration as legitimate sources of opinion by most of the other side, among whom it is an article of faith that anyone sympathetic to my kind of views is to be quashed.

Everyone on Youtube whom I watch in this way is well aware how precarious the situation is at the moment for non-progressive dissent. This includes the knowledge that their channels, and any meager income stream they might derive from it, could be swept away at the whim of the staff of a giant corporation, the management of which has explicitly thrown its corporate weight to the other side of the war. For the moment, the giant woke corporations grudgingly tolerate both the creators and us viewers. All smart Youtube creators on our side, and even those not outright hostile to our side, have made backup plans for the moment that their channels are eventually deleted due to complaints from the Wokenistas demanding conformity to their views. They know the worst is probably yet to come this way, but that in our persistence will be our inevitable victory. In some ways this is the Golden Age. Whatever happens, we will adapt.

After the hard news of politics and Hollywood, I often ease us into a selection of videos about interesting but lighter lifestyle topics. These are highly varied from day to day but include house construction techniques, tiny homes, gardening, homesteading, foreign apartment living, offbeat outdoors adventures, historical cooking, lockpicking, coffee making, personal travelogues, overseas vagabonding, and reviews of RVs and trailers. There is almost an infinite variety of interesting things to watch made by people out there you've never heard of, videos that they have graciously produced and then posted online for the world to see. It feels so much the opposite of the well-known "two hundred channels and nothing to watch" feeling that one gets scrolling the cable television listing.

I often end the evening's programming with a short religious lesson provided from one of the sacred-oriented channels I follow. Lately it is usually a Catholic source, often a priest, since Catholics are by far the best at getting out their message this way, and they draw on a much richer source of commentary than most Protestants will do. Then after this, in the time that we begin preparing for bed, I sometimes put on some music, most often something relaxing and Medieval.

I don't see any possibility I will ever go back to watching broadcast/cable television the way I once did. It feels liberating to let it all go forever. I still love classic movies, for example, and I go through phases of watching TCM and then giving it a break, as I have done lately. I have the TCM iPad app if I want to watch something on their schedule. Personally I think TCM cannot last much longer in its current format in this political environment, so perhaps I'm just preparing for the inevitable end of it that way. If it goes away tomorrow, I'm prepared. They can't hurt me by taking it away from me. I've seen my fill of 1930s movies to last a long time.

A month ago I was looking forward to the return of football season---both college and professional.  J enjoys those too, especially the professional game. She has her favorite players and teams, and we've watched the Sunday night game on NBC almost every week for the past few years. I had been assuming that we would start watching television again on weekends just for this alone.

But not any longer. It is evident that both college and pro football this season will be subjugated to political messaging, and harnessed by the networks to attempt to deliver the election result they desire. So I am happy to join the boycott. They can play without my attention. I sat out entire seasons  before because of the intrusion of politics into the game. This time I suspect the suspension of fandom may be permanent. If the last Super Bowl is the final football game I ever watch, that is fine by me.

Before the shutdown hit, the very last broadcast television we were watching in the evening, besides some shows on Arizona PBS that I don't particularly care about, was coverage of Pro Rodeo on a channel devoted to that. J, who grew up watching much less television than I did, recently became a fan of it after football season ended, and I followed her in cultivating an enjoyment of it.

We especially like the bull riding, because we are fans of the bovine species in general. We provide our commentary for the animals, in voices we make up for them. Of course the rodeo circuit went into hiatus with the health emergency. I haven't missed watching it. Last week J found that the rodeo channel has begun broadcasting live events again, so we may get around to watching some of them. But I feel in no hurry at all to do this.

Meanwhile, I love stumbling across some hitherto unknown and obscure Youtube channel to add my go-to list for the evening's programming selection. Last week I discovered that there are many short videos online, made mostly by zoos or animal sanctuaries, of baby beavers. The wild kingdom lives!