Think The Unthinkable

The Wife suggested last night that we get rid of all of our televisions and not replace them.

There was a time that I did not have a television and was perfectly happy not watching TV, ever. I read books instead; I would watch sporting events at friends’ houses or at sports bars. It made me have to really want to see the game in order to go to it.

Now, I would miss TV during football season, although again I suppose I could go to a bar and watch a game on a Sunday morning (and see my Packers every week that way, too). But I would also miss Battlestar Galactica. (This even after last week’s blandly anticlimactic event that ought to have weighed larger than it did in the story arc, coming on the heels of several other lackluster episodes.) I suppose I could wait for it to come out on DVD or figure out some way to watch the podcasts. But something tells me that I wouldn’t do that, that it would be too much trouble. I have great interest in HBO’s series Rome, but I haven’t bothered to watch any of it even though the first season is available on DVD.

I wouldn’t need a TV player to watch a DVD; the computer shows DVD’s just fine and if I really wanted to watch one bad enough, I’d do it. I think later tonight I’m going to do exactly that, with a set of DVD’s that I’ve been meaning to watch for a long time but just haven’t got around to yet. So it’s not like The Wife’s proposition would leave us without audiovisual entertainment.

I wonder what she would do, though — she watches more TV than I do, I think. She likes to watch “lampshade shows,” so-called because they are about people I don’t know agonizing over what lampshade to put in a house I’ve never seen and don’t care about. I would miss the Daily Show, although if I don’t see an episode it doesn’t bother me very much.

So maybe we can think the unthinkable. We’d have to find some way to keep the high-speed internet, though. Can’t do without that, not at all.