I Killed My Television

I haven’t watched television regularly since December of last year. When I moved into my new apartment that month, I thought I’d save a little cash by not hooking up cable TV. Since I can get the only two TV shows I watched regularly through iTunes, anyway, it wasn’t much of a sacrifice. And I haven’t missed it since.

It would have been easy to get cable TV hooked up. After all, I needed cable internet to be able to effectively teach my online composition courses. That costs me $60 a month, and TV only would have been an extra $40. It was tempting. I have never not been without TV. I don’t think many of us have. That damned cyclopean glass eye is in almost every living room, family room, kitchen, and bedroom in the country.

A number of things held be back, however. First, there was the money. I was only saving $40 a month, but $40 is $40, especially when I knew I would almost never be home to watch the TV I would be paying for. I might have spent the $40 if I’d had a TiVo (and not one of the vastly inferior DVRs that Comcast could provide), but the TiVo I used to have belonged to the ex, so no time-shifting for me. Third, I could actually time-shift the only two shows on television I care about these days, now that anything and everything created by Joss Whedon and/or Tim Minear is off the air; The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are both available through iTunes, for about $20 a month combined, and I can take them on my iPod and watch them during my train ride to work every morning. In the end, it was easy to kill my TV.

The television set itself is still in one piece, actually. It even still works. I needed it for a while to watch movies on. I killed cable, but not my Netflix queue (although I did dial that down to one movie at a time, limit two a month). And after I got a new wide-screen laptop with an absolutely gorgeous screen resolution, I watch movies on that. But I most emphatically do not watch regular television anymore. No slanted cable news, no stupid sitcoms, no shows I love canceled because network execs didn’t get it. I get my news from NPR and the Associated Press (via Yahoo). I get my laughs from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I have my favorite movies and TV shows on DVD. I read books. Non-fiction, even. I don’t need television, and I don’t miss it at all.