The only good thing about being sick is that, when you’re conscious, you can watch daytime television. I have memories of being sick from when I was young, and I remember watching game shows when I was in grade school. When I’m sick, I have strange nostalga for Campbell’s soup, peanut butter and jelly on saltine crackers and “The Price is Right.”
I was up and about for a couple of minutes this afternoon, so I did some simple phone based chores. Basically I called a bunch of caterers and asked them to mail me info about their wedding reception offerings, then phoned Detroit Edison to straighten out the fourth billing screwup in the past five months. After that I decided to not get up out of the comfy chair that was keeping the room from spinning, so I turned on the TV.
It’s been a while since I watched daytime stuff… I flicked past the Soap Operas as a matter of course. I’ve got nothing against them as shows. I’ve taken enough TV and video production courses to have some inkling of how tough it must be to do a show live to tape five days a week, and I admire how well they do it. I just can’t follow the plotlines. If you’re a new viewer and you want to start watching a Soap, you’ve got to have either a written guide or an assistant who’s been watching the show for twenty years. If you’re home sick for a day, it’s not worth tuning in.
The game shows have been given their own network, which seems like cheating. You used to have to make the hard decisions about what to watch, and now they’re all lined up in a row. Reading the show titles sent a strange litany of catchphrases through my head. “Joker, Joker, JOKER! COME ON DOWN! Big bucks, NO WHAMMIES!” I decided that I didn’t need to have that simmering in my feverish brain, so I moved on.
The best daytime TV, in my opinion, has got to be the Mystery Channel. I don’t mean the channel you get when one of the kitties has planted their paw in the middle of the remote. I mean the constant detective show network. I watched the second half of a “Murder She Wrote” and all of a “Columbo.” It was just what I needed. Nice and relaxing…