Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of striatic.
My parents got cable this weekend. This is a momentous occasion, since I spent a fair bit of my childhood without a television in the house at all, and all of it without cable, which I didn't get until I moved down here, and well, we all know how that's worked out. I've been no good for anything else since. (I kid. Television has certainly eaten up a great deal more of my time since I got cable, but I've always been someone who has needed background noise for writing. If anything, it's traded off with my music-listening, not my reading.) So I was interested in Ta-Nehisi's post detailing why he got rid of his television. This sentence, in particular, intrigued me: "Owning a television didn't work for my family." But he doesn't really elaborate on it, and I'd be curious to hear more about why that was the case. Too hard to monitor content? Too much time away from other things, like reading, and sports? Too much of a parental timesuck?
I'm curious because, while I moan quite a bit about growing up without a television, I actually think it was good for me. The only thing I genuinely missed out on, and that has made it slightly harder for me to participate in the national conversation, was The Simpsons. I'm glad I had Ghostwriter, as an image of an integrated urban school, and to a much lesser extent, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? But as much as I enjoyed those shows, they weren't indelible in the same way some of the books I read as a child were. When the Fantastic Mr. Fox trailer came out, I remembered the food images from it instantly. I can recall specific images from individual pages in a children's history of fashion I took out repeatedly from the library. Because I read so much, I learned to read very quickly, and to absorb a great deal, and since I turned out to be a writer, someone who thinks in text (and sometimes even dreams in it), I'm grateful for all that time I had with all of those books. Watching more television as a child would have turned me out differently, and that would have been fine, I'm sure, but I have a hard time imagining who that very different person would be.
I'm thinking about these issues a lot, I suppose, because I'm working on a piece for The Atlantic this week about children's movies, and what it takes to show proper respect for and understanding of young audiences. And in rereading Fantastic Mr. Fox, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Where the Wild Things Are, the impact of those books, of their words and images, came back to me more powerfully than I'd expected. I'll have to find a way to rewatch some Ghostwriter soon, too (perhaps in a format more congenial than chopped-up YouTube bootlegs), and see if has any of the same effect, as nostalgia and as art.