Almost everything worth knowing I learned from TV. I taught myself English by rewinding and replaying old, scratched-up VHS tapes of The Honeymooners. When my own childhood was derailed by a string of very bad decisions, I found comfort in the Keatons and the Cosbys and the Conners, families whose every quarrel was amusing and resolved within 22 minutes. I remember rushing home one afternoon in 1993—a prehistoric era in which humans, having yet to discover the DVR or Netflix, had to sit in front of their sets at a particular hour to watch their favorite shows—eager to make it in time for Beverly Hills 90210. I ran into my room, and as I was about to grab the remote I noticed a brown envelope lying on my bed. It was a letter from the Israel Defense Forces, into which I was to be inducted the following year, and I knew that it contained the verdict about where I would serve and at what capacity, the Israeli equivalent of the American letter from the college of one’s choice. It was heady stuff, and I was eager to find out, but I was also eager not to miss a second of my beloved show. I stared at the envelope, then at the TV. It wasn’t really a fair fight. The IDF could wait; Brandon, Dylan, and Kelly could not.
My infatuation with television has since grown into a more mature and nuanced love, which is why the news last week that Fox will soon allot a stretch of its Saturday-night programming to a new, off-beat animation strip made me more despondent about the future of the medium than I’ve been since that low moment in which the aforementioned Kelly, forced to choose between her two aforementioned lovers, announced “I choose me” and set a new record in terrible TV writing. It’s unfair to judge any work of culture sight unseen, but if reports of Fox’s new endeavor are any measure, the future of American television is grim.
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