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I imagine that there is no twelve-step program for those addicted to television, but if there were I would be in the front row at the meeting and after we said the “serenity prayer” my hand would fly up and I would proclaim, “My name is Donna and I am a television addict.”
I have been struggling with this addiction since age 5. I recall having to watch Don Ho sing “Tiny Bubbles” as he strummed the ukulele. If I was unable to watch him because my mother was vacuuming or some such nonsense I would throw a fit. Arthur Fonzerelli was my crush. I would have done anything to be his Pinky Tuscadero (Leather was too butch for me). At age 6 I begged my mother to invite him to my Barbie birthday party. He did not come (damn him!).
As I grew in age, so did my hunger for the tube. I moved on to harder stuff, the kind of programming that gave me a daily fix. Yes, I speak of re-runs — The Brady Bunch, each day wishing secretly that I shared the little blue bathroom with Marcia, Greg and the whole gang; in junior high, Star- Trek ruled my thoughts and occupied my time with inter-planetary travel and fantasies of me as the sexy blue Martian woman. In high school I would skip plans with my real life friends to hang out with Alex P. Keaton (Family Ties) and dream of Mallory’s fashion advice. My addiction only got worse as I moved through college and eventually got my own place where life afforded me unlimited on demand cable. I was consumed by the endless choices and I fell deeper into the throes of it, watching for 5 hours at a time – watching literally nothing, my thumb working the clicker like a temptress lover, gently at first and at times fierce and furious. The headaches came and I found myself letting the answering machine pick up my calls for fear of missing a single moment.
Then one day I met Andrea Beaman — who, in an ironic twist actually earns a large portion of her income as a TV host and appeared on Bravo’s Top Chef. We became fast friends. She noticed my behavior and was the first to utter the words, “Hey, I think you watch too much television.” She expressed her view that television was the ultimate time stealer — a robber of life and ideas, an unsolicited attacker to the mind filling the head with needs and desires and all sorts of crazy notions. I saw it all manifesting in my shopping cart at Duane Reade (creams and lotions), or at the super market. There were cans, jars and boxes of ‘new and improved’ items that I somehow ‘needed’ to make my home, laundry, and skin softer, fresher, younger.
