When I was about six, my brother and I had an abnormal fascination with television. Most of our days consisted of waking up, watching TV, playing with toys, eating when we absolutely had to, watching even more TV, then going back to sleep. One day, after reviewing the cable bill, our dad told us that our family had the second highest TV consumption in the country, meaning that in the entire nation, only one house watched more TV than us.

Despite never having dealt with anything as grown up as a cable bill, I still knew that this sort of information would never be included. And even if it were, the cable company would only tell you if you were first, a true superlative. No one would care about being second.

This, I quickly realized, was one of our father’s first attempts to make us watch less television. I do admit that at this point, my brother and I treated television like a crucial IV drip, but I saw nothing wrong with that.
Unfortunately, our dad wanted to put an end to this, and started implementing a series of lame rules to limit the time we spent watching TV. Over about a month’s time he prohibited TV after 5:30 PM and required us to write a book report for him every two weeks (the subjects of which were usually picture books or Archie comics). These rules were annoying but easily avoided as there were no actual consequences to breaking them.
Then, he decided to ban TV on school days. Initially brushing this off, my brother and I found that this would become major blow to us as our dad decided he would actually enforce this. The punishment for breaking this rule, unlike those previous, was grounding. My dad asserted that this meant having “no fun,” and even worse, no TV.
At six years old, I wasn’t dealing with many complex emotions (mainly hungry, sad and sleepy), but through the lens of time, I can conclude that I had felt completely oppressed by this new rule. Television was a major part of my life and it was being torn away, leaving me with nothing but longing, boredom and about half a dozen incoherent book reports written in colored pencil.
Eleven years later, this has hardly changed. Technically my father’s “no TV on the weekdays” rule is still in place but was tacitly abandoned years ago. However, unlike when I was six, my entire day cannot consist of mostly TV and occasionally becoming a part of society. Various commitments to school, homework, extracurricular activities and other boring garbage have prevented this. Furthermore, whenever I wasn’t watching TV, I could no longer distort my face and cross my arms to overtly display that I was having a horrible time. Instead, I had to be tactful and feign amusement or interest in what other people were saying, all the while thinking about what I would eat while I was finally able to watch TV again.
I’ve gotten the impression that people think it’s strange how much time I devote to television. My friend and I were once sitting in the school library talking about the previous night’s episode of Broad City and a couple of other sitcoms that had also aired while someone who described herself as a “book worm” listened in. Upon hearing us talking about these shows, the Book Worm asked us, “how do you guys have so much time to watch TV?”
My friend answered that she just “didn’t have a lot of homework.” I was slightly dumbfounded by this question. It was strange that other people didn’t seem to worship TV as much as I did. Besides, my friend and I were only talking about, at most, an hour and a half of television. I had also watched a few episodes of 24 beforehand, but she didn’t need to know about that.
I answered that I didn’t have much homework either, secretly hating her for asking me this question. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it, but it did begin to ignite something inside of me that I didn’t like at all. I watched more television than anybody else I knew. My brother, a fellow devotee when we were younger, stopped watching TV to the caliber I did pretty soon after our parents got him an Xbox and he entered middle school. Now that he was in his twenties, he has plenty of other things to worry about, like working, dating and being a social drinker (“Some of us actually like hanging out with our friends,” he said to me with a slightly villainous tone).
Sitting in front of the TV all day may have been cute and harmless when we had nothing better to do, but now that we were both burgeoning young adults, I got the impression that it was no longer either of those things. I could tell by the way my brother had already jumped ship, and that someone had found it strange enough that they felt the need to question my daily schedule.

My devotion to television was not just a fun distraction anymore. It now felt like a distraction of an entirely different sort, one that was pulling me away from daily life rather than filling in all the boring parts. In all likeliness, this had been the case since I started watching television, but I hadn’t really noticed it until now.
I couldn’t decide how concerned I should be about this. Missing out on “life experience” is something that I’ve been trained to avoid, mostly through situations like my parents telling me to stop playing my Nintendo DS when we went on an eight-hour drive to Toronto. Although, I thought to myself, how mad could I be about missing out on this time of my life when television consistently portrays it in a much more interesting and fashionable way? At least on TV, major life decisions were set to Coldplay songs and nobody had acne.
Eventually, however, I decided that I probably needed to start leaving the house more, if only so I didn’t have to understand adolescence vicariously through Elle Fanning movies. In order to do this, I began spending more time with my friends. I generally enjoyed the presence of these people for short periods of time, but probably thanks to the contained and consistent way most television shows are presented, I would become bored with them after about an hour. Besides, all we ever did was sit around, checking our cell phones and playing video games.

Disappointed by these results, I slowly and graciously let TV dominate my life all over again. Abandoning goals like this was nothing new to me; I often did with things like dieting and exercise, but a part of me still felt like I was in the middle of a crucial part of my life, one that should be rife with experiences and stories I could talk about when I got older, and I was hardly noticing it.

After coming home from work one day, my brother came to me and expressed interest in watching what he described as “something sci-fi, but not set in space.” I excitedly suggested he watch Orphan Black.

“It’s the perfect show for you,” I told him.

“Have you watched it?” he asked me.

“Of course I have!” I said, practically screaming. “Tatiana Maslany is the queen of TV!”

We moved quickly to our basement, sitting side by side in front of television, as we had done for countless hours when we were younger. I started to think about the role I allowed television to play in my life. It wasn’t a nostalgic tether, or one that represented the bond between my brother and me. Instead, it had become, as unhealthy, or antisocial, as it may seem, one of my biggest hobbies and passions, a close friend that was always there for me to provide entertainment and comfort and asked for nothing in return.

I began to feel very aware of my recent effort to gradually phase it out. What was the point of that, I wondered? Someone in the library had made an offhand comment, one they probably forgot a minute after making it, and I allowed it to affect me so thoroughly that I saw it as an opportunity to improve myself. But this improvement would mean eradicating one of my favorite hobbies, one that I found perfectly normal, just because she found it strange. There was no point in trying to change any of that for her; she wouldn’t have cared. The only person who I would be proving anything to was myself and I wouldn’t even have been that impressed.
Besides, even if my plan had been successful, my life would not have changed for the better. Naturally, I would limit the amount of television I watched in a day, probably to my father’s fervent approval. To fill this time, I would begin reading more books, all the while thinking about what a great TV show it would make, or going to a friend’s house and wondering if they had a Netflix-capable device, and if so, had they seen the new season of Orange is the New Black yet? Essentially, it would be a huge waste of precious time that could be better spent doing the one activity that I enjoyed more than anything. I don’t see why I’d ever want to do that to myself.