TV just got scary. I was more than aware that the age of digital cable and extreme narrowcasting"" was upon us, making more channels with less fans for each show, but it didn't really hit me until this past weekend when I was asked to turn on a game at work. Granted, TVs at sports bars have ultra-huge packages that most of us don't get, but as I tried to scroll through the 900-channel long TV guide to find the Phillies-Dodgers game, I found that there were about 5 different Phillies-Dodgers games to choose from. Naturally, I panicked. There was Phillies-Dodgers, Phillies-Dodgers HD, Phillies-Dodgers FxHD... Which was the right one? After three years, I had finally memorized the major Wisconsin channels, and now I had to figure out each one's high-definition correspondent? I thought television was supposed to be a passive pastime!
Now, the point of this isn't to show how inept I am with technology - though that's definitely the case - but I believe the culture of watching TV has shifted. At first I marveled at the number of program options open to us, but now it's just annoying. There are so many channels to choose from, and the recent Emmys proved that the best TV isn't just on the major networks or HBO anymore, so how should we know where to tune in? Maybe the next hit show will come from QVC or the Golf Channel. The channels are going to become so niche-oriented that any concept of a television community is bound to crumble. When JGtv (Jewish Girl TV) comes out, I'll only have five percent of the campus to talk about it with. And why, in our made-to-order lives, should we waste our time flipping through hundreds of channels to know what's good? To be completely blunt, we don't even need the physical television set anymore. We can read about what shows are getting buzz, YouTube some clips to see if we like it and then Netflix an entire season of a show and watch it straight through, commercial free, on our laptops.
While we're on the subject of YouTube, the internet is becoming much more of a television community than actual television is. I guarantee that when it comes to entertainment, I've had more instances of friends gathered around a laptop than around a television set, whether it's watching YouTube clips or television episodes on one of those streaming websites I have yet to figure out. My roommate watches the ""Lawrence Welk Show"" SNL clip on NBC.com a minimum of seven times a day, and the sad part is, I join in every time.
This is why TV - actual television box TV - right now is most successful when it goes back to basics, covering live news and sports events. It's the only way we know we're all tuning it at the same time, because we all saw Michael Phelps win his eighth gold medal, and we all are getting election news, whether we're conservative (FoxNews), liberal (CNN) or super liberal (MSNBC). We're not going to wait and Netflix Anderson Cooper's show, we want to know how crappy our economy is doing right now. So as frustrating as finding the right sports channel may be, once it's found, at least everyone is groaning together at the same time as the Badgers give up yet another touchdown. It's the idea of community, which at the moment can't be found with any comedy or drama on TV. Even if we watch the same show, we're probably not watching it at the same time. Sadly enough, if I've just met you, we'll have more luck talking about the ""Charlie bit my finger"" clip than a television show.
To swap Hulu clips with Ali, send her an e-mail at rothschild@wisc.edu.
