57 Channels and Nothing On

I lived for the first 12 years of my life without cable (on a black and white television). When my family finally got hooked up (we were cable subscribers in the generation after the tan box with the push buttons), I developed a nasty habit of starting at channel 2 and clicking upwards to the last channel that the cable provider would allow. Finding nothing interesting on (as in the words of the Bruce Springsteen song, referenced in the title of this post), I keyed in channel 2 again and repeated the whole process. I could easily spend an hour with the TV on, but not actually watching anything.

When I moved in by myself, I brought with me my grandparents’ 13-inch TV and accompanying bunny ears, partly out of impecuniousness, but partly out of a desire to not spend hours not actually watching television.

But the other week, my old TV blew a picture tube and it was time to buy a new TV. Which did not come equipped with bunny ears attachments. So I buckled and signed up for Rogers Digital Cable.

I don’t think I could even estimate how many channels I get with the basic cable package – partly because I haven’t found them all. I’ve only made it up to the hundreds. And in those hundreds are a lot of Simpsons, Friends and Seinfeld reruns. Often the same episode running on several different channels. And then an hour later, you can watch the same episode again, but from a Manitoba channel.

And the home renovation and decorating shows – my god, is there no end to them? I thought we’d been oversaturated with reality shows. Obviously I hadn’t been watching daytime television. Soap operas and talk shows have been taken over by a plethora of shows hosted by women in overalls and men toting around swaths of fabric to make into curtains.

So those are the drawbacks. What about the positives?

Well, I can watch Oprah now (on a Manitoba channel). I have a vast selection of sitcom reruns to watch as I make dinner. The TV doesn’t go fuzzy on rainy days.

And my knowledge of home renovations has never been better…