Why I'm Addicted to TV

I wrote this a while ago but just now got around to posting it.

My sister laughs at me for being a TV junky. She finds it funny because she says I was never very interested in TV growing up. I've only given it a little bit of thought until this week. Wednesday when I got home from work I looked up a particular episode of a guilty pleasure show and on Netflix and watched it. The feeling was so cathartic that as soon as the credits started to roll I dragged the cursor (or whatever that button on the bottom is called) back to the beginning and watched it again. After that I dragged it to one particular scene and watched it again. I was in the middle of watching it a fourth time when people came home. I suddenly felt silly and shut my computer down to visit with them, all the while feeling very agitated.

This sounds ridiculous and I feel even more ridiculous now that I've written it down. The whole incident has bugged me and made me really think about why I do this. I think I've found a some what suitable answer.

I love TV shows with an element of fantasy ( or better yet  anything unrealistic) to them. This doesn't have to be anything huge, it can be realitively subtle. For the purpose of this post I will say that three of my all time favorite TV show are Glee, The Gilmore Girls, and Dexter. (Dexter does not seem to fit, but it does for reasons I will explain.) All shows are in many ways based in reality but all of them have things about them that the make the audience suspend their disbelief for example many of the musical numbers in Glee, the crazy idallic town in Gilmore Girls, or the fact Dexter works in a police department and no one suspects he's a serial killer.

All of these shows have something other than unbelievable elements to them. The emotions portrayed in the shows are realistic, close to home, and portrayed very well by cast, writers, and directors. This is why I think I've become addicted to TV shows. They allow me to experience emotions with a realitive amount of detachment. Four years ago I was in other my head and I could not deal with the intense emotions I was feeling. That's about the same time my fasination with TV and movies started. I think it is also why I like movies and shows with a very present element of insanity. It gives me enough detachment to allow me to feel really safe in vicariously experiencing emotions that I don't want to actually feel.

I came to this realization while watching the same handful of scenes on repeat. I had decided to watch them based on a converstaion I had with J the night before. I was trying to explain to him how frustrating it was to deal with emotions that I had no right to feel anyway. Spefically feeling protective and responsible for a person who I am not actually responsible for. J could not understand the idea of feelin emotions that I know I shouldn't feel.

It reminded me of an episode we watched once that bought up this exact conversation. In the epsiode a character breaks down about her jealousy of a relationship when she is also in a relationship. J felt she was being a big jerk because she clearly wanted to have things both ways. I found it tragic because clearly she knew she had no rigt to be jealous which only makes the jealousy more difficult to deal with.

Obviously watching this episode over and over was helping me deal with an extremely emotional issue that I couldn't deal with on my own. Or rather, it wasn't helping me deal with it, it was helping me experience it with a nice safe level of detachment. It sounds so unhealthy the way I wrote it, but it's more of an intial coming to terms than anything. I just wrote this to help me think about why it is I've become so obsessed with TV.