What the Television Raised
Television raised me. Not in the neglectful-parents, absent-from-the-home way people mean when they say that—in the more literal sense. The box sat in the living room and transmitted values, delivered models for behavior, and showed me what families were supposed to look like. Several versions, every half hour, each one just convincing enough to believe in for thirty minutes before the credits rolled.
Before streaming, before torrents, before any of it, there was the TV guide. You memorized the schedule the way you memorized a bus timetable—not because you wanted to, but because missing it meant actually missing it. When Friends came on in the evening, you were there, with whoever you could get onto the couch, because watching alone felt like a waste. Ross and Joey and Rachel weren’t just characters; they were the evening’s event.
Scrubs taught me to think in montage. Full House taught me that Jesse Katsopolis was genuinely attractive in a way that took me a while to think clearly about. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air had Will Smith chasing women and outrunning his cousin’s embarrassments, and it was funnier than almost anything that came after. The O.C., Family Matters, Married with Children. Those shows came on at specific times, in specific seasons, with commercial breaks that functioned as punctuation—a moment to argue about what just happened before the story resumed.
Most of those shows are gone now, or exist as reboot bait and nostalgia content. Instead of the communal ritual, I sit alone at my computer at midnight cycling through whatever the algorithm has surfaced. Not always because the shows are better—they’re not always—but because Hollywood never stops producing them and the platforms never close. Gossip Girl. The Big Bang Theory. How I Met Your Mother. The pipeline runs twenty-four hours and I’ve learned to drink from it whenever I remember I’m thirsty.
The question I keep coming back to isn’t which era produced better television—that argument is circular and boring. It’s about what television was for. The scheduled show at seven o’clock was an appointment, a specific thing done with specific people at a fixed time. The algorithm-served episode at midnight is consumption without ceremony. I don’t think I miss the shows as much as I miss what happened around them: the people on the couch, the commercial break where you got up to make tea, the argument when you sat back down about what was going to happen next.