Want to Survive the Coronapocalypse? Why Not Watch TV?

I hate television with the intensity and purity of someone who once loved it beyond all things. As I wrote in one of my various poor-selling memoirs, as a child and teenager television was so much more than just a way to spend 16 to 20 hours out of every day: it was EVERYTHING. It was entertainment. It was diversion. It was sex. It was my only friend. 

Holy shit, did I love television! Then I read Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and suddenly began to understand just how toxic and nefarious a cultural force television really was. Reading Postman’s manifesto permanently and dramatically changed the way I saw not just television but also my writing, my thinking and my creative process. 

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that reading that one massively influential book re-wired my circuitry and caused me to see the world in a new, markedly different way. 

Then the internet came along and usurped television’s position as the most potent cultural poison afflicting society, in no small part because the internet provided a million new, and more effective ways to watch television. 

Given my fierce, undying hatred of television the advice I am about to give you might seem a little strange, if not downright counter-intuitive: in order to survive the Coronavirus pandemic with our sanity relatively intact, I sincerely encourage everyone to watch as much television as possible. 

Bear in mind, I am NOT encouraging people to watch FOX NEWS. I don’t think anyone should ever watch FOX, regardless of the context. Nothing good can come from watching FOX News. For that matter, I do not encourage the quarantined, terrified and house-bound to watch news of any sorts. 

Yes, it’s good, even essential, to be informed but television news is the WRONG place to seek good, useful, relevant information that can benefit you and your family and the PERFECT place to have your already paranoid fears aggressively re-affirmed by profit-mad scare-mongers. 

No, the television that I am suggesting you binge-watch over the course of the next few perilous days, or weeks, or months, or years, or decades, or centuries or millennia (we don’t know how long this thing will take to play out) are instead of the comfort food variety. 

For my wife and myself, television comfort food often takes the form of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Seinfeld, two wonderful, eminently re-watchable shows about terrible people, and 90 Day Fiance, a wonderfully entertaining reality show about terrible people. 

For me, TV comfort food is generally Conan or Comedy! Bang! Bang! I was just thinking that seeing Conan without an audience will make the Coronavirus real and concrete to me in a way nothing else has, including the seeming end of civilization and my family being quarantined in our home for the indefinite future. 

In times and peril and crisis television’s terrible flaws become strengths. We desperately NEED escape now. We NEED to forget about our problems. We NEED distraction. We need consistency. We need continuity. We need ritual and repetition and familiarity. 

These are all things that television can provide us, in good times and bad but ESPECIALLY when things are bad, and brother, things haven’t been this bad in a while and I have lived through three years of the Trump presidency. 

The sheer volume of great television can be daunting and intimidating. There’s just so much transcendent television being made now! Who has time for it all? Guess what? You do! You have nothing BUT time! Like Burgess Meredith in the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last” we FINALLY have time enough at last for all of that wonderful, terrible television we’ve been putting off due to having lives.

So turn on the TV and let it deceive you into thinking that the world’s end is not imminent and that life is predictable and safe, nothing more than an endless series of formulas and cliches. 

Everything is different now. For example, television can now be a potent force for good as well as fear-mongering and misinformation. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place in the apocalypse by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

AND of course you can, and should, choose an even better form of escape and distraction in the form of the Weird Accordion to Al, my new 400 page, lovingly illustrated exploration of the complete discography of “Weird Al” Yankovic at https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion&qid=1580693427&sr=8-1#customerReviews