Opinion

Quitting TV Shows Again

The Mt. Hope Scrolls

Posted

I just quit watching a television series. It’s nothing important. The series was a comedy show that was popular about twenty years ago.

Television shows seem to come to me late. A new television show comes out and I don’t watch it. Maybe it’s because the show only comes on once a week and I can’t get the day of the week to coincide with my schedule or maybe the show doesn’t interest me or it’s supposed to funny and it is not. 

Lately, I’ve been watching shows that are twenty years old that I didn’t know anything about. The difference now is I am finding these shows in little video clips. Of course, people posting these little clips are posting the very best material. That makes all the difference. A fight scene might be a minute long. Your hero beats up the bad guys in one minute and you don’t have to watch five minutes of bad acting to get to the fight scene. A little clip might have 3 excellent jokes in 2 minutes and you don’t have to suffer through twenty minutes of bad storyline. Once you get a few of these clips you get interested in the show. Now with all the cable syndication, you might be able to watch these shows twenty-four hours a day. None of this stuff of waiting for next week to see what happens.

That’s what happened to me. I watched these little clips of a show and each one was hilariously funny. The show would be on almost any time I watched TV. I started watching the show to see if one of the good jokes came on. You could watch several shows in one sitting. In one night of watching you could see almost a fourth of a TV series. In a week you could see a whole season and pick up on the character development and get an idea of what the show was really about. You didn’t have to watch TV for ten weeks to figure out what was going on. In a week you could get all the jokes, character interaction, and whether the show was any good or not.

Well, I’ve been watching a show for about a month. I think I have watched all the shows. Now I’m quitting that. I’ve wasted enough time and I’ve learned all the good jokes. My friends that used to watch the show think I’m a genius for remembering a joke from a TV show that was on twenty years ago. I don’t ever tell you that I watched it last night.

Author Elmore Leonard used to say that he didn’t write the stuff that people didn’t want to read. That’s true with the little clips of these shows. No need to play the things people didn’t want to watch. I watched clips to get hooked and then had to watch the whole show to get over them.

I finally at the end of this series, I’ve gotten good mileage from the jokes and I know the plot and all the characters. Quitting or at least cutting down on TV viewing is always good for me. I feel like I can use my time for something that is worthwhile. If I ever need to I can watch the show for about ten hours a day. I play seven days a week.