Man with TV 1986

TV is central to our lives.  Both my husband and I take our dinners into the living room where we sit, plates in our laps, and watch our favorite programs every evening.  I'm reminded of Bob's Grandparents watching Lawrence Welk every Saturday, only now they are long gone, and we are watching our own versions of the saccharine band leader.  We talk about characters as if they are our friends, analyzing what has been said or done long after the show is over.  When we go out to parties or to have dinner with friends, we discuss our latest favorite shows, among them, Naked and Afraid, a reality show about two strangers of the opposite sex dropped in the wilderness to survive without food, clothes, or water for 21 days, or Transparent, a TV series about a family in Los Angeles whose father comes out as always having thought of him/herself as a woman. We now have cable with it's billion trillion(mostly worthless) channels, Netflix, and now, Amazon Prime, so we have even more access to movies and television series.  Many of the programs we watch are excellent, and it's being said that we are in the Golden Age of TV--series that are allowed to follow complicated and compelling story lines over years, like Breaking Bad or The Sopranos.  But even when we only had four stations and a tiny black and white set with Rabbit ears, we were still TV Junkies.  At least now we can pretend that what we are watching is vital to our development as human beings, and not just pure escapism.