Within Four Walls

More notes on PBS and the like (see last Wednesday). I might as well write about TV, since it’s amazingly cold outside for early December, and this inclines me toward inward writing. Inward as in inside the house, where the television is, not into the bright meadows and dark thickets of the psyche, which, paradoxically, is often the stuff of uninspired writing.

I’ve never been inclined to donate to any PBS station because they are, in fact, commercial stations. There are commercials at the end of the shows, have been for years, and while that’s a more civilized way to show commercials, it still represents ad revenue.

And sometimes it represents fatuous sentiment, just like on standard commercial stations. This is the tag line for a brand of “kid-friendly, all-inclusive” resort that buys time on PBS: “Time spent learning today is time spent building a brighter tomorrow.”

Unless you’re learning, say, the techniques of jihad. But even if you’re learning something more benevolent, I’d be hard-pressed to see how the slogan applies to a resort, even one with things for the whelps to do, considering that a resort vacation is pretty much about gratification in the here and now.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that (necessarily), to borrow a catch-phase from a show I’ve seldom watched, now or when it was in primetime. When I do, though, it seems like it’s going to age badly. It’s already beginning to. The history of entertainment is littered with such.