Couch Potato Protagonist: The Longest Blog About Television You Might Ever Read

I like to watch television. I don’t have much shame attached to this admission. It’s a major pet-peeve of mine when anyone mounts their moral high-horse because they “don’t watch television”. Which, if you don’t by choice or for whatever reason, is totally fine, but don’t even start with me about how TV rots my brain. I know, and it so deliciously rotten! But you know what else rots my brain? Noxious fumes of righteous indignation.

Since TiVo gloriously swooshed into my life, I have liked to watch the magic, glowing box that much more because its become convenient to my every whim. I’d wager a guess that approximately 80% of shows I watch are of the finite, non-fiction variety – i.e. if its on Food Network, TLC or Discovery Health Channel its very likely to get the green ‘thumbs up’ button from my TiVo remote. Basically, shows with no on-going story-line or plot, one episode pops that can be watched whenever in no order in particular, like The Colbert Report (genius!). Cable has been very good to me in this regard.

I’m reluctant to get sucked into on-going serial shows with plots, characters and intrigue because a) I am moderately picky about what I’ll spend my time watching (of course, there are Extreme Guilty Pleasure exception- see below), b) I don’t have enough time in my life to commit myself to many 30 minute or hour long shows per week (yes, even with TiVo), I’ll just end up falling behind and giving up entirely and c) I can only emotionally invest in so many fake people’s fake lives before my heart bleeds for all their unrequited love and dead children.

Currently, I have three “real” shows in rotation: The Office, 30 Rock and Gray’s Anatomy. Obviously, you know where to find me on Thursday nights between September and May. I am also a die-hard fan of The Sopranos and Entourage but they're currently out of my rotation because I no longer have HBO – so please, I beg you, don’t spoil them for me, I’m vainly trying to hold out for the DVDs. Gilmore Girls has been a huge one in my life, but it mercifully ended this month so that brings my "real" show tally down to the aforementioned three.

30 Rock is new to the schedule. It started off a little uneven but its been on a role since after Christmas and has been unstoppably hilarious through the end of the season. It’s the closest thing still on television to Arrested Development – not quite as hallowed as AD but giving it a solid effort. 30 Rock has more than earned a spot on my Season Pass Manager.

The Office is an absolute-must-see-live, meaning I like to watch new episodes as they air rather than whenever suits my fancy on TiVo. If a new episode is scheduled I refer to the entire day as “New Office Thursday” because it absolutely makes my whole day (its a small life that I lead). I root for Jim and Pam with a robust and uncynical heart, as if their potential happiness might somehow salve the disappointment of every unrequited love I’ve ever had. The season finale left me full of hope for next season and not just on the Pam-Jim front; so many things have a lot of potential going forward. It was the best way to leave the viewers for three months – wanting more and hating every empty Thursday until its retun.

Which brings me to Gray’s Anatomy, whose season finale was the antithesis to The Office’s. Take everything I said in the last half of the preceding paragraph and reverse it. It left me wanting less, not caring if its off-air for three months or three millennia and, worst of all, wishing I hadn’t spend the last 9 months of my life on the terrible third season. Sure, its had its moments, just enough to keep me going week to week, but honestly after the season finale I am done. Not coming back in the fall and I’ll be bamboozled before I watch the horrendous-looking spin-off (Gray's needs Addison- she is the only character left worth rooting for). Every single person and relationship depicted on the show is unfulfilling and miserable to watch. I’m all for a little angst but Gray’s left that place a long time ago and has succommed to unrelenting, tiresome lugubrious misery. No, thank you! It takes a lot for me to give up on a show I’ve laughed and cried with since the very first episode. Hat's off to Shonda Rhimes, who has mustered up writing and plots bad enough to send even a stalwart fan heading for the exit. Does anyone else who watches GA feel this way? Am I over-reacting? I finally got The Fiance hooked on it this year (no small feat), it’s a real shame to abandon ship now. Alas.

Watching television plays two main roles in my life: emotional outlet and mental vacation. The latter is largely a made-up justification for all the really bad shows I end up flipping on, the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. Law school has brought this out in me big time. I used to have higher standards, really I did! But there is nothing that soothes a weary mind, tuckered out from hundreds of pages of casebook reading, than something as banal and trite as The Hills or Girls Next Door. It’s total junk food, but its well earned after the intellectual boot camp that is law school. I don’t even feel bad (maybe just a little). But in my defense, I don’t know a single person in all of law school that doesn’t watch a handful of terrible, quasi-reality shows. It’s cheap therapy. We have loans to pay-off, we can’t afford the real thing, ok?

Then there’s the emotional outlet: I’d rather get wrapped up in melodramatic, trivial fantasies than melodramatic, trivial realities. I try not to take myself too seriously, but somehow taking Jim and Pam’s unrequited love very seriously helps me to get out my female (or just plain human) desire to feel and care way too much about things that don’t really matter. TV is perfect for this. It’s slightly better, in my estimation, to care too deeply about not-real people in fictional stories than wallow and dwell on meaningless minutiae in the real world. Then when a show starts to get me down, I can just as easily shrug “eh, its just a show!” and move on. That’s the beauty of the emotional outlet.

Why did I just write 1,000 words about television when I have a bar exam to be studying for? Perhaps because television, much like blogging, is masterfully distracting from a reality of tests and uncertainty and mortality; from a reality lacking the culinary prowess of Ina Garten, the wit of Stephen Colbertor the body of a Playboy Bunny. And my reality, its really such a wonderful thing. It might not make the best television show, but its for the best. After all, if my life was already on the small screen, then what would I watch?