People always say "I watch too much TV" like it's this accepted truth, that TV is something you should always cut down on. It's seen as equivalent to "I eat too much sugar" or "I drink too much." No one (well, almost no one) ever says "I read too many books" or "I see too many movies." What's so bad about TV, anyway? As someone who watches more TV than the average person, and generally considers it not enough, I wanted to test that notion: Could I watch too much TV? If I left my set on for 24 hours straight, if I subjected myself to all the perceived inanities of modern television, would I see what people are talking about?
Not wanting to waste a single moment of wakefulness with non-TV-related activities, I forego such niceties as showering and dressing and begin viewing nearly the moment I wake up. Despite my optimism as I turn on the set and try to catch the early news, all I get are commercials. I wonder if this is a bad sign for the day ahead, but eventually I settle in to watch the local anchors tell me about today's weather (cold; good thing I won't be leaving my apartment), the goings-on in the presidential election (shrill) and traffic on the freeways (smooth; too bad I won't be heading in to work today).
After careful analysis of all the local news, I decide that Fox 5, with anchor Josh Talkington (he talks!) and weatherman Ted Pretty (he's pretty!) is the winner, thanks to its amusingly named on-air personalities.
From the local news, I naturally transition into the network morning shows. Since most people don't watch these shows for more than a few minutes, they repeat the same stories, and, as hot as Katie Couric is, I just can't take any more discussion of the Laci Peterson case. I change over to Teletubbies, where there are no dead pregnant women.
Watching Teletubbies is like taking a sedative; the bizarre creatures with their strangely soothing non-language are designed to captivate and calm 2 year olds, but they work on 2 year olds of all ages.
I get dressed and move from my bedroom into the front room, where I employ my trusty TV table to eat my breakfast of Cheerios. Having had my fill of chipper network news anchors, I turn to cable and discover the secret to actually catching music videos on MTV and VH1: You have to turn them on when no one is watching. Lindsay Lohan's new video, in which she attempts to channel J. Lo for reasons only her management team understands, is disturbing enough to get me to turn away.
Instead, I gravitate toward a different breed of hyper-sexualized young girls: the Olsen twins, in their pre-hyper-sexualized phase, in the 1995 theatrical release It Takes Two on TBS. As in any Olsen twins movie, it involves mistaken identities and the twins meddling in the affairs of adults. It also co-stars Steve Guttenberg and Kirstie Alley, big names for an Olsen film. Disturbingly mesmerized, I watch for nearly an hour. Lessons learned: Kids in foster homes are spunky and loving; your 10-year-old daughter always knows what's best for your love life; money can't buy happiness, but it can buy a very big house and a wisecracking butler; neither Olsen twin can pull off a convincing upper-crust accent.
I cannot escape the Olsen twins movie. Its overwhelming awfulness has sucked me in like a hypnotic spell. I change channels, hoping for escape in something more intelligent, and instead I find Live With Regis and Kelly. Disappointingly, Regis has the day off, so I am stuck with Survivor host Jeff Probst, who's clearly out of his depth alongside the preternaturally perky Kelly Ripa. Slightly more soothing is Oprah, who's talking to Renee Zellweger and Hugh Grant about the new Bridget Jones movie. Like a warm security blanket, Oprah chases the horrors of the Olsen twins movie away.
Part of the idea of this exercise is to take in the various staples of TV viewing, so in the interest of exploration—and having already checked out Oprah and Regis and Kelly—I turn on The View. I realize that while I may have previously understood The View in theory, I never really understood its sheer terror until spending a good 12 minutes actually watching it. Every shrill, banal, self-absorbed stereotype that's ever existed about women is on display during every moment of this show. It's like watching what you fear is inside the heads of the housewives of Middle America come to hideous life. I can't even tell you what the gals talk about, although at one point it involves—really—pig testicles.
I escape from The View into a repeat of last night's Daily Show on Comedy Central, an old episode of The Twilight Zone on Sci Fi and a syndicated repeat of Dawson's Creek. This is the TV I know and love: biting social satire, effective, insightful drama and cheeky soap opera. The View becomes a distant memory, taking residence alongside the Olsen twins in the scarred depths of my psyche. It's only 10:30, but I decide it's late enough to start snacking.
I finally find something worth watching all the way through: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on Spike TV. DS9 is one of my favorite shows, hands-down the best Trek ever. This isn't one of its finer episodes, but it's still entertaining enough to keep my attention for almost the entire hour.
This is the value of setting time aside to do nothing but watch TV: When else would I be home at 11 a.m. on a weekday with nothing to do for an hour but watch Star Trek? I wish I had more opportunities like this. There are so many great things on TV, but all anyone remembers is the bad. It's a medium judged unfairly by its worst moments. A good TV show, like DS9, can easily stand toe-to-toe with a good movie, but no one wants to acknowledge that.
During commercials, I flip to the Binion retrial on Las Vegas One, which is both mind-numbingly boring and strangely fascinating. A forensics expert discusses her examination of various pieces of tinfoil. Tinfoil.
Noon
The Binion retrial breaks for lunch, and so do I, eating a ham and cheese Hot Pocket. (Nothing remotely healthy will pass my lips this day.) I offer up a blessing to the programming gods at Spike TV, who've gifted me with another episode of DS9, this one much better than the last. It's soap-opera time back in network TV land, so I take in bits and pieces of All My Children, none of which make a lick of sense. Of course, if I weren't a die-hard DS9 fan from way back, I'm not sure if any of that would make sense, either.
There's some pretty steamy sex on Days of Our Lives, but I can't follow the plot. Much better is an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which I maintain is one of the most underrated shows of all time. Within the confines of the predictable half-hour sitcom, in which the characters must learn a lesson by the end of each episode, it manages to get in some clever, often pun-based humor, create some remarkably well-rounded characters and revel in a gleeful sort of absurdity. And as the voice of Salem the cat, Nick Bakay is a comedic genius. Really.
Since I caught about a minute of the Jean-Claude Van Damme E! True Hollywood Story earlier, I figure it's my duty to watch at least a little of this Van Damme movie on USA, which seems to me at first to be his sequel to Universal Soldier. Later I realize it's actually Replicant, a different movie with Van Damme playing a government-designed killing machine. Credit the filmmakers with finally finding the perfect role for Van Damme: a primitive clone who lacks the power of proper speech.
Question: Why does Tony Danza have his own talk show?
Somehow the Van Damme movie is still on. Does he kick and punch for three hours? Instead I turn to the verbal kicking and punching of Dr. Phil, who begins his show by bringing out a girl who idolizes him. Dr. Phil needs to be taken down a peg or two.
I switch to Ellen instead. She's got to be one of the five funniest people on TV these days. She does these great bits responding to viewer letters and calls, which would all sound stupid written down but which she delivers with such perfect timing that I can't help but crack up. Today's bit involves a pregnant viewer who wants Ellen to coach her through the birth of her child. She's sent Ellen a pager and everything and promised to name the baby, a boy, Ellen, if Ellen actually flies to Minnesota to help her through labor.
Again, I wish I had time every day to just sit and watch Ellen, even when she's interviewing inane celebrities like Christina Applegate. Ellen, I love you.
My friend Jason comes over to keep me company for a bit, and I force him to endure one of my favorite TV guilty pleasures: Family Feud, hosted by former Home Improvement co-star Richard Karn. If the oft-rumored Family Feud curse exists, dooming Richard Dawson to hermit-dom, Ray Combs to suicide and Louie Anderson to gay sex scandals, it's apparently cursed Karn with being the most inept game-show host of all time. The Feud itself is amusing enough, but what makes it brilliant TV is Karn's complete inability to ad-lib or say anything that remotely resembles a joke. He has these long, awkward pauses during which you can see the contestants waiting expectantly for him to say something clever, or perhaps wondering if he's run out of batteries. Then he inevitably says nothing, or just repeats the question, or says something incoherent that the audience laughs at because they assume it must be a joke. It's great car-wreck TV.
One of the survey questions asks which appliance people couldn't live without and, naturally, one of the top answers is TV.
Jason leaves, perhaps driven away by the Karn vortex, but I stumble on the best thing in my entire 24 hours of viewing: Gilmore Girls on ABC Family. I watched this show a few times when it began airing on The WB, driven by its critical acclaim, but could never get into it. Maybe it's the passage of time, maybe my tastes have changed or maybe this is just a particularly good episode, but this is some great television: sharp writing, lively acting, funny and touching all at the same time. This episode features the return of Rory's dad, who's refreshingly portrayed not as the typical TV deadbeat dad, but as a genuinely conflicted man who loves his daughter but couldn't handle being a parent as a teenager. If only I had the time to watch this show every day to catch up.
I put on Static Shock, a mediocre superhero cartoon on Cartoon Network, and take a 20-minute walk around the room to get my energy back up. Sadly, this is more exercise than I get on the average day that's not spent watching TV for 24 hours.
It's dinner time, so I order pizza from Papa John's. Enough time has passed since this morning's Oprah that I can now watch Oprah After the Show on Oxygen. Some audience members are being a little hostile to Renee Zellweger about the media's unrealistic beauty standards. She looks like she's ready to run out of the studio. The audience on Bravo's Inside the Actors Studio is being far kinder to Jude Law, who's talking about his passion for storytelling.
Although I'd rather spend my time watching Four Weddings and a Funeral on Oxygen or Discovery's Green Valley Ranch-based reality series American Casino, I feel it's my duty as a dedicated TV watcher to turn on A POW Story, Sinclair Broadcasting's "news" program about the anti-John Kerry documentary, Stolen Honor. The worst thing about the show isn't its right-wing bias; it's that it's shoddy, thrown-together television, with poor production values and bad editing. It tries to offer a semblance of obejctivity, showing a long clip from the pro-Kerry film Going Upriver to balance out the Stolen Honor clips, but the efforts to toe the line only make the show more boring. There's a really hokey segment on the power of the Internet in the election that looks like it was put together by a high-school AV club. At least a rabid anti-Kerry program would have gotten people riled up. This show is ideologically neutered, poorly constructed and woefully uninteresting. I watch the entire thing.
I read the other day that comedian Chris Elliott is guest-starring on the NBC cop show Third Watch as a serial killer, so I turn it on hoping to catch him. It sounds like an ingenious bit of casting, but wading through the cliché-filled show to get to Elliott's appearance is painful. I flip over to Comedy Central, where a South Park marathon has started. I could probably watch that the rest of the night, but I won't. The Food Network is showing $40 A Day, in which the host is highlighting some of the best cheap food in Cleveland. This is information I will never use.
Finally, Chris Elliott shows up in the last minute or so of Third Watch. He's creepy as the serial killer, and the producers made a smart move casting him against type, but I won't be tuning in next week to see him again.
There's another episode of South Park on, but I spend most of the hour watching dr. Vegas on CBS. I wasn't too impressed with the episodes I watched a couple of weeks ago, but I figure I'll get a second opinion. Diagnosis: lame. The chemistry between Rob Lowe and Joe Pantoliano is amusing, but the show is just as boring as it was the last time I watched it. The high point is a guest appearance from former Talk Soup host Hal Sparks as himself.
Thank goodness Ellen is on again, this time on Oxygen, which is fast becoming my favorite cable network. It's not even the same as this afternoon's episode. I love Ellen, but I love VH1's Best Week Ever a little more, so I watch its deconstruction of the week in pop culture instead of Ellen's interview with uber-annoyance Robin Williams. It seems they've tweaked the format of BWE since the last time I watched, and some of the bits go on way too long. My obscure TV crush, comedienne and regular BWE panelist Jessi Klein, isn't even on this week's episode.
I finally find laughs on, of all things, The Tonight Show, with former Daily Show correspondent Mo Rocca doing a bit about presidential pets. As soon as Jay Leno comes back on, though, I have to change the channel.
I change it to David Letterman, who's always reliable, and then to Tavis Smiley interviewing Richard Branson on PBS. Smiley's set unfortunately reflects the meager budget of public television and looks like those old Saturday Night Live skits that parodied Sunday-morning cultural-diversity programming. Charlie Rose knows how to rock his minimalist black-backdrop-and-table set, but Smiley's producers have tried to make this look like a real talk show, and all it does is highlight the lack of resources.
Conan O'Brien, however, has a camera on the floor that he dubs a "crotch-cam." No lack of resources on that show.
Starting to feel a little tired. The pizza catches up with me, and I pop some Pepcid for the heartburn and some Tylenol for the TV headache. It's goofy game-show time, with both Elimidate and Street Smarts competing for the attention of stoned frat boys coming down from their highs. Elimidate appears to have introduced some sort of gimmick whereby one of the potential suitors is a spy, only the others don't know it. In this episode, it means this girl's brother has to pretend to be hot for her while he scopes out the dudes who actually are hot for his sister. It's creepy, but not as creepy as this weird, public-access-style show I come across on KTUD, something called Paul Bowman's Million Dollar Country Music TV Show, with an old guy in a cowboy hat playing country videos. He's sitting in what looks like a DJ booth, with the camera uncomfortably close to his face, talking about the potential of up-and-coming country artists like he's in the biz, and not on some second-rate Vegas TV station in the middle of the night.
I've reached the magical hour when the phone-sex commercials start airing and the crazy guys with the Southern accents try to sell you knives. I used to sit and watch the knife-selling show for what seemed like hours when I was in college. I miss the days when I had nothing better to do but sit and watch bizarre late-night TV every night.
Nowadays, I rarely get to see things like Talk Sex, the sex-advice show hosted by the nice old Canadian lady on Oxygen. She's got those red and blue dolls that she uses to demonstrate sex positions, and she's always encouraging women to demand oral sex from their partners. Between her, Ellen and Oprah, Oxygen clearly proves that women are superior.
Who knew that TBS, home of the horrific Olsen twins movie, was so awesome late at night? Earlier, it had repeats of Futurama and Family Guy, and now it's showing the HBO sketch-comedy show Mr. Show, with the occasional swear word bleeped out. I've actually never seen the show before, and if my brain weren't turned entirely to mush by potato chips and peanuts, I'd be able to better appreciate its hilarity. Blind Date is more at my intellectual level right now, and I think I might be addled enough to want to call the goofy Southern guys and buy the set of 10 pocket knives that are only $3.50 each. Certainly that's a bargain if you need 10 distinct pocket knives, right?
My sister drops by after a night out and keeps me company (and awake). The smallest things amuse me at this point. For example, they are selling steak on QVC. Who buys food from a home-shopping channel at 4 in the morning? And how does that work, exactly? My sister insists we watch The Brady Bunch on TV Land. Bobby hires someone to pretend to be Cindy's secret admirer. At this point, even the plot of The Brady Bunch has become hard to follow. Since small children are awake on the East Coast by now, Blue's Clues is on, and its simplistic songs and colors are about all my mind can handle right now.
My sister leaves, and I head back into the bedroom for the home stretch. Appropriately enough, TV Land is now showing Full House, so I can end my odyssey with the Olsen twins, now all the way back in their toddler days. It's sad to think that I used to love this show, considering how vapid and unfunny it is. How did Bob Saget ever have a career?
I count down the moments to the 24-hour mark, lining up my empty food wrappers on the kitchen counter. Final food tally: one pizza, three cans of Mountain Dew, four bottles of water, one bowl of Cheerios, one tube of Lay's Stax potato chips, one jar of French Onion Dip, one mini-bag of popcorn (mostly eaten by my sister), one ham and cheese Hot Pocket, two chocolate chip cookies, two Nestle Crunch Bars and assorted honey-roasted peanuts.
As soon as the clock strikes 6, I am in bed. The apartment is eerily quiet without the TV on.
I awake refreshed and heartburn-free. Although I am hungry and haven't showered in over 48 hours, the first thing I do is plop down on the couch and turn on the TV.