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TIME MAGAZINE, JUNE 4, 2001, VOL.157 NO.22
Couch Potato Blight
Want to veg out in front of the boob tube? In this multitasking age, forget about it
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK
My TiVo has decided it knows what's best for me. Pretending to be a responsible journalist, I have the news on in my office, but my TiVo—the digital TV recorder that is a trusted sidekick for my job as a television critic—figures I'd rather watch So Weird, a goopy family show on the Disney Channel. And unlike my VCR, TiVo can do something about it. A couple of clicks from its infrared channel changer and instead of the conflict in the Middle East, there's One Day at a Time's Mackenzie Phillips—yes, she's still working!—strumming a guitar and singing: "We're two, two, two in a billion/ In a one in a million world!"
I switch to CNBC, then leave for a meeting. When I come back, the set is tuned to a rerun of Jesse, the thankfully canceled Christina Applegate sitcom. It's like walking into your office and finding your sixth-grade class bully waiting to beat you up again.
Thanks to TiVo, I no longer merely watch TV; I wrestle with it. Sure, I could turn off the TiVo's suggestions feature. But I'd feel like I was shirking my critical responsibility to embrace the medium's future. Besides programming TiVo to record my favorite shows, I also indulge in a special function that lets me rate programs with its "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" buttons, so that it learns to guess my tastes better.
Watching TV, in other words, is becoming work, not just for people like me but anyone with a PC and a TV in the same room. Turn on CNN's The Spin Room and you can continue the political debate in a chat room full of partisan psychos in love with the CAPS LOCK key. Watch a basketball game and you can log on to a website full of all the snooze-worthy stats that network producers get paid good money to slog through for you. Check out the Oscar preshow on E! network, and you can rate the stars' outfits online, the results updated in real-time on TV. There is even online-enhanced home shopping, so you can waste money rather than just time.
All of this recreational multitasking is not only a technical change but an assault on the very couch-potato philosophy of leisure, which I hereby dub chaise-pomme-de-terrisme. In today's productivity-minded, techno-Puritan culture, you are a sloth and a loser if you aren't doing at least two things at all times: making a cell-phone call while checking messages on your Blackberry, checking stock quotes while making love to your partner, and so on. It's strange to think of watching the tube as a throwback to a simpler, more contemplative day, but that's what it looks like amid the URLs and chat room quotes cluttering the screen right now.
The most successful interactive TV offerings are the least interactive. Game-show play-along sites—like the one for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire—are merely improvements on the age-old practice of yelling answers at the screen. And they work. The least fruitful type is the kind that comes to mind when hearing the phrase "interactive TV": collaborative, choose-your-own-ending stories, which are becoming more widespread than ever. The season finale of ABC's eminently forgettable Two Guys and a Girl allowed viewers to vote online among four possible endings. (I searched in vain for the options to cancel the series, burn all videotapes or watch Disney honcho Michael Eisner commit ritual suicide in shame for having aired it.) Meanwhile, the creator of Dharma and Greg is developing a sitcom for Fox called Nathan's Choice, in which the hero faces a dilemma halfway through the show, the audience votes on his "choice" online and the second half of the show is based on the winning vote.
My gut tells me most of the audience will vote with their remotes—for whatever happens to be on competing channels. It's no coincidence that these interactive gimmicks are most common on shows that have passed their prime (Drew Carey) or never had a prime to pass (Just Shoot Me). They're the new-media equivalent of Homer Simpson banging on the side of the TV, yelling, "Be funnier!"
What's more, a series that asks the audience to help write it accepts the myth that TV would be better if it only responded more to its audience's wishes. The problem with too much TV is that it delivers exactly what the audience thinks it wants. Whereas great shows spring on the public something it never would have asked for: a sitcom making fun of the Korean War (M*A*S*H), a show about a Cuban band leader and his wife in the white-bread '50s (I Love Lucy) or a farce about the selfish exploits of four whiny New Yorkers (Seinfeld).
Democracy makes for fine government but lousy TV. In the U.S. version of Big Brother, audience members voted off the most interesting contestants early in the show; as a result, the producers are leaving the voting in season two to the contestants. The lesson: I don't want you programming my TV and, trust me, you don't want me programming yours. I can't even control my own. Just now TiVo is telling me I want to watch a rerun of the '80s sitcom Growing Pains, and frankly I'm too exhausted to argue. If you need me, I'll be multitasking with a bag of potato chips.
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