parent guides his children through the television experience, and the dangers brought on by too much easy-chair safety. If all that TV comedies did was to provide us with was a rest from TV tragedies (one half-hour dose of no emotion, to make up for a tense hour spent in the courtroom or the hospital), then they were indeed useless. But as rest spots between moments of real living, as an escape from things that happened in the real world during a decade whose metabolic rate seemed to have been unnaturally sped up, nothing did better than the kinds of TV I drenched myself in, more than I should, probably, on all those afternoons when I came home from school. Even now I don’t know what my mind fills itself with when I watch that kind of television show—maybe nothing at all. I cannot stop the world and get off, or stare at water and go blank, but I can turn on “I Love Lucy” reruns and turn off. Raised in the age of the THINK sign, being able to do just that was, I believe, no small accomplishment.
My favorite program of all was not a situation comedy, though, but a six-part show about a hospital whose kidney machine could take on only six patients and had applications from twelve. Each week we saw the applicants and their families pleading their cases, listened to the doctors (Kildare and Gillespie) deliberate. Between shows, my friends and I speculated as to who would be put on the machine and which patients’ blood would be left unfiltered to poison and kill them. Like little gods we bent over our carrot sticks and Twinkies, cold-heartedly weighing the age of an applicant’s children against the indispensability of another in a particular chemical plant, against another patient’s wife’s suicidal tendencies, against another’s surly attitude. The week when the doctors’ choices were revealed, I found my guesses had been exactly right. Which proved not that I’d reached some height of wisdom or judgment but only that, just as I’d learned to pick Miss America and her runners-up not on the basis of whom I liked best but by predicting what the judges were looking for; I had learned to second-guess TV.
What I acquired in my years of Kildare-watching was not a set of ethics but a sense of TV absolutes, the ten commandments of the screen, by which I now know that if a hero falls in love with somebody, she’ll have to die, and that, while mean criminals can get sent to prison, good-ones-gone-astray must end up, instead, with bullets through their hearts, because for them it must be all or nothing, happiness or death, and prison seems too inconclusive a finale. I learned not how things are, but how things are on television, and once having learned that, far from being bored at having lost all feeling of suspense, the need to watch grew stronger. Like the pleasure you get from doing math problems over and over, once you’ve learned the theorem that proves them, I watched to see the patterns I’d become aware of be confirmed. I found it marvelously comforting to feel that at least something in life could be predictable.
E VERYBODY HAS ONE SOMEWHERE in his memory of growing up—a death remembered, a date whose anniversary you note each year (one year ago today … two …), a place on some highway whose skid marks remind you, a yearbook page, edged in black, “in memory of”—even listing them sounds sentimental and tear-jerking; as the word “prom” carries instant connotations, so does the mention of crashed cars and memorial scholarships. We go back to them at odd times—late at night and full of beer, on New Year’s Eve, in thunderstorms—and tell the story over and over again; like “the night I lost my virginity,” it comes up: your first encounter with death. Grandparents and distant relatives are rarely mentioned—they may be loved, but old people are supposed to die; there’s sadness, but no real shock in that. It’s the death of another young person—maybe one you barely knew—that comes
My favorite program of all was not a situation comedy, though, but a six-part show about a hospital whose kidney machine could take on only six patients and had applications from twelve. Each week we saw the applicants and their families pleading their cases, listened to the doctors (Kildare and Gillespie) deliberate. Between shows, my friends and I speculated as to who would be put on the machine and which patients’ blood would be left unfiltered to poison and kill them. Like little gods we bent over our carrot sticks and Twinkies, cold-heartedly weighing the age of an applicant’s children against the indispensability of another in a particular chemical plant, against another patient’s wife’s suicidal tendencies, against another’s surly attitude. The week when the doctors’ choices were revealed, I found my guesses had been exactly right. Which proved not that I’d reached some height of wisdom or judgment but only that, just as I’d learned to pick Miss America and her runners-up not on the basis of whom I liked best but by predicting what the judges were looking for; I had learned to second-guess TV.
What I acquired in my years of Kildare-watching was not a set of ethics but a sense of TV absolutes, the ten commandments of the screen, by which I now know that if a hero falls in love with somebody, she’ll have to die, and that, while mean criminals can get sent to prison, good-ones-gone-astray must end up, instead, with bullets through their hearts, because for them it must be all or nothing, happiness or death, and prison seems too inconclusive a finale. I learned not how things are, but how things are on television, and once having learned that, far from being bored at having lost all feeling of suspense, the need to watch grew stronger. Like the pleasure you get from doing math problems over and over, once you’ve learned the theorem that proves them, I watched to see the patterns I’d become aware of be confirmed. I found it marvelously comforting to feel that at least something in life could be predictable.
E VERYBODY HAS ONE SOMEWHERE in his memory of growing up—a death remembered, a date whose anniversary you note each year (one year ago today … two …), a place on some highway whose skid marks remind you, a yearbook page, edged in black, “in memory of”—even listing them sounds sentimental and tear-jerking; as the word “prom” carries instant connotations, so does the mention of crashed cars and memorial scholarships. We go back to them at odd times—late at night and full of beer, on New Year’s Eve, in thunderstorms—and tell the story over and over again; like “the night I lost my virginity,” it comes up: your first encounter with death. Grandparents and distant relatives are rarely mentioned—they may be loved, but old people are supposed to die; there’s sadness, but no real shock in that. It’s the death of another young person—maybe one you barely knew—that comes
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