Dear J-
Watch enough TV and eventually you begin trying to fit your life into its strictures. I’m far from the one who’s got the “kill your TV” bumper sticker going and not quite a rabid defender of the vidiot box, as we did spend a significant amount of money on both the TV and the recurring cost of the TiVO but this summer rather than watch reruns or surf around trying to figure out what worked for us we spent the evenings separately reading the feeds we’d set up in our RSS readers. And we talked. Granted, most of the talks were about things like “did you see that” or “I shared that with you yesterday, how come you haven’t read it yet?”
Now that the fall TV season is back, though, and we have the TiV”O for terrestrial TV, we try to have it all: reading and watching, a house divided falls against itself. No, not quite that dramatic. What ends up happening is we have too many choices for entertainment now and while I’m busy fiddling with my various tumblr accounts, theVet’s waiting for me to finish so we can watch TV or vice versa. The danger with TV is that the shows that I thought I’d love pale in comparison both to what I’ve been reading over the summer and what my expectations were. For instance, 2 Broke Girls has an interesting hook and a decent premise but is let down a bit in the execution: the lines are so wooden that I’m having a hard time believing the actors as the characters they play.
Besides that the show is filled with stock characters and stereotypes which hurts the watchability: okay, we get it. She’s bitter and jaded but that just concelas a heart of gold; she’s naive and spoiled but sweet. Together they are an unstoppable force. There are a ton of these odd-couple stories everywhere you look but the problem with TV is that I end up believing it for half an hour or so at a time and then end up confused that my life isn’t mirrored on the screen. Once that half hour is up, though, I go back to realizing how much better real life is and head back to it, smug and satisfied.
Mike
Dear J- 
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