Mondays with Mike: Get off my screen!

A friend of ours once said, “I don’t want to be alive after the last person who lived before there was television is gone.” He’s no Marshall McLuhan, but he gets it—the medium is the message, and the message is not all that great. More of a pollutant.

Diana, The Crown, Windsor, The Great British Baking Show. Enough with Anglophilia!

Smart phones, tablets, even computers—they’re all a form of TV. Once TV was unleashed on the world, its narcotic effect drove us to want more phosphorescent screens with moving images, in more places.

I listen to more radio than ever—partly a function of living with a person who is blind. There’s a ton of smart stuff on the radio, and I wouldn’t have known it if Beth wasn’t such an avid listener.

I don’t watch TV news. I don’t like Fox and I don’t like MSNBC or CNN. That we’re clutching our pearls about social media’s influence is a little quaint—after all it was cable news that invented the twitchy, nervous, fearful, desperate, reactive news cycle. It perfected bottom-of-the-screen crawlers that read: Breaking News: Election Still too Close to Call. (Breaking news: there’s no news! But keep watching!)

And now we have streaming. Which is just TV on steroids. It better feeds the addictive quality of screens. In the past, we had to be present on Tuesday evening when “St. Elsewhere” was on, or hope we catch it in reruns in the spring. Otherwise, well, we didn’t see it. Now, we can binge watch. We can have anything we want when we want it. Sort of.

The volume of stuff is off the charts, and to distinguish themselves, more and more programs seem to have jumped the shark before their first episodes. A high school teacher turned drug kingpin. A money launderer moves to Missouri. It’s like craft beer: “This IPA is insanely hoppy.”

“Oh, well, our IPA is more insanely hoppy, and it has avocado!”

Then there is the sort-of-historical stuff, the worst of the ilk being docudramas about the British royals. We have a friend in Britain who rails against the royals. And against Americans fetishizing them. It’s as if he’s saying, “Don’t encourage them!”

Couldn’t agree more. But then, against my better judgment, Beth persuaded me to turn on The Crown. Everybody loves it. They talk about it on Fresh Air. We have nothing better to do, so I think, why not be like the cool kids?

If you’re waiting for something about a change of heart, don’t hold your breath. I’ll take St. Elsewhere, or LA Law, or hell, The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I’ll just say my favorite part of The Crown was the warning that was superimposed with the program’s audience rating: I read it out loud without providing context for Beth—as I am wont to do with odd billboards and other curiosities. It’s a bad habit in any situation, but especially when you live with a person who can’t see. Beth squints, trying to understand. And then I explain myself.

“Sex, nudity, language, smoking,” I said. She squinted. I had no explanation.