R Blog: Watching TV Makes You Smarter

Writing in Sunday’s New York Times author Steven Johnson reports that watching TV makes you smarter. Whew!!! This is great news for the Smith family, as inveterate and reliable a group of TV watchers as you can find anywhere. We got into TV early. As I recall, it was 1951 and I snuck home from school at lunchtime to watch the World Series (Yankees over the Giants in 6). That preceding summer, as an eight year old, I actually watched the entire Democratic and Republican conventions. So, I didn’t like Ike. Sue me. It taught me to stand my ground on unpopular positions such as, “Hey. Really. There’s some pretty good stuff on TV.” We loved TV so much that when nothing else was on we’d watch the test pattern which looked like this:

We were the first family in our neighborhood to have black and white television. A few years later we scooped yet another neighborhood with the first color set. Such joy. My brother Bart browbeat my dad into getting one by singing, “black, white, gray,” “black, white, gray,” every time the Wonderful World of Disney came on. Of course, WW of D, Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar, The Texaco Comedy Hour, and more than I am willing to name were family events. In high school, during the summer months, I would stay up every night watching Jack Paar, honing my sophistication and driving my mom nuts by laughing too loud. She hated missing Jack Paar but she had to get up for work.

When our youngest was in middle school Thursday night was inviolable as a family TV night with NBC’s powerhouse lineup of Cosby, Family Ties, Cheers, and then a half hour break before Hill Street Blues. We really liked Hill Street Blues. It was challenging as well as entertaining. So much going on and stories lapped over into succeeding episodes.
In the Times article Hill Street Blues is the example of when complexity arrived in television with multiple threading. Mr. Johnson writes in his long article that with today’s shows “you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships.” He calls this the “Sleeper Curve”, and his theory is that, “the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.”
Johnson's article is cause for celebration in the various Smith households, the majority of which are equipped with TiVO, or Replay TV and large screen television sets and, most often with the premium cable package or satellite. I mean if you are serious about TV you’ve got to have HBO.

When we get together our family often (usually) watches television. Tastes don’t overlap completely but we will extend ourselves by sampling from our relative’s inventory of shows. (My sisiter-in-law Mayumi, for example, follows a Japanese soap that’s really pretty good. My mom always has a good supply of Ellen DeGeneris on hand). So, we pretty much have it covered from The Sopranos to Real World. We don’t really need http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com to get our recaps. We can e-mail or call a brother, mother, niece, son or daughter-in-law and ask, “Hey, what happened on America’s Top Model” last night? Or, “How did Rob and Amber do in The Amazing Race?”
The “TV Alert” has long been a fixture in our family. The phone rings. It’s my mother. “Are you watching Larry King?” she queries. Click. That’s it. That’s the entire conversation. That’s a “TV Alert.” Check it out. We look out for each other. It’s rather heartwarming. Since we have times zones covered from Eastern to Hawaiian and because we all check e-mail at least 400 times a day, a viewer can e-mail a TV Alert to the next time zone as in: “Desperate Housewives is hot tonight.”

I am indulgent of my many friends who tell us with pride that they don’t watch TV. I have always known they are missing a lot of great entertainment. I stifle the impulse to proselytize for, say, Deadwood, my current favorite show. (After all, the gross language on Deadwood might shock the c_________s). No. Instead I smile a knowing smile with the knowledge that TV is making me smarter.