Dear Television

Dear television,

I think I love you. Then what am I so afraid of?

It could be the granola crunching, NPR listening, sustainable social justice advocates that happen to be my friends. They’ve never been very fond of you. Something about brain rotting and imagination killing. It seems irrelevant to them that throughout my relationship with you I have continued to believe in and appreciate the fight for immigrant rights, public radio, and organic cereal. Many of my friends find our love to be poisonous. I must say, sometimes, I can’t blame them.

I know about your flaws. It’s no secret you are not one of discriminating tastes. Your love of exploitative, racist, sexist, classist, mind-numbing trash is hard to ignore. You’ve given birth to a 24-hour news cycle that changed the American political system into even more of a three-ring circus than it already was. And then there is the advertising. There is no amount of brilliant programming that will change the fact that you are a prostitute for capitalist consumer culture, whoring yourself out to the highest bidder without judgment or critical thought. You bend under the pressure of our conservative, patriarchal society, standing up against the prude only when it titillates you. Your poor decision making skills reflect everything that is wrong in American culture today.

But nothing is perfect.

You’ve come a long way since you first became a household staple. Your history is important to understanding how you operate as a medium today, but it’s also available on Wikipedia, so I won’t recite it for you here. The critical piece is that today we are in a time when the same amount of talent, effort, and money that goes into making the finest films also goes into making television. There is also an opportunity in pay cable, such as HBO, for television to operate with similar censorship rules as a feature film. This gives us something wonderful: high quality, mainstream, serialized entertainment. The ability to observe a large cast of characters, in depth, over a long period of time. The storytelling possibilities are endless.

To be fair, you’re not the first to do this. Literature, while mostly existing in single novels, does experience a great deal of success in serialized story telling. This is most notably seen in young adult series like Harry Potter (seven parts) but is also frequent in adult genre fiction, like mystery, romance, and sci-fi. Comic books, another lover of mine, also utilize serialized story telling most of the time, often carrying on a narrative for years, sometimes decades. Each of these mediums knows the benefits of the serial, and has used the format with great skill for a long time, and certainly will continue to do so for years to come. But, in what is perhaps a great tragedy, no book, except maybe the Bible, the Koran, and the twilight series, will reach and affect the lives of as many people as the television.

I love both literature and comic books. I will always love to read. I don’t think I will ever be able to say that I love you, the television, more than I love to read. I love you both equally. But I think that not only have you accepted my love of literature, you have embraced it.

For I think it is time for us to begin thinking about my relationship with media as a polyamorous one. It is simply impossible to have a fulfilling relationship with you without having a passionate and loving relationship with literature and film, and to a certain extent, video games. Our love is just more satisfying when I can fully appreciate where you learned your mad skills. I won’t be jealous when you reference Dostoyevsky, Fellini, or Alan Moore. I’ll take it as a sign that you appreciate my intellectual promiscuity. And every time you mention a book I haven’t read or film I haven’t seen, I’ll know I need to spend some time with my other lovers.

We are in a relationship. This is not a blind love or an obsession, although it may be a healthy addiction. Neither of us is perfect. Our love takes work. You struggle to overcome societal norms and be a catalyst in changing how we view the world. I struggle to make it past the first thirty pages of Ulysses instead of watching reruns of Flavor of Love 2. You promise me that you’ll make an effort to portray strong women and non-stereotypical gays and main characters of color, and I promise I will work really hard in school so that some day I’ll have a job helping you fulfill that promise.

The future holds a lot for us. It’s going to be difficult. There’s lots of knowledge to be gained, prejudices to be broken, minds to be changed, hearts to be won. Then there’s your addiction to advertising money that must be healed. But you are a powerful tool that connects our lives and reflects our culture. You bring a continuous story into our homes, week by week, and spark discussion, community, and imagination. True, millions of viewers abuse their relationship with you, using their time with you as an opportunity to shut off their minds and forget about the world. But they haven’t learned to love you the way I do. And I do love you.

Love is always a frightening thing, especially when it involves an inanimate object. But I know what I feel for you is true, and that together, we’ll move mountains.