TV Makes Everything Better*
Posted by: Rocketcool in Essays, Writing, tags: A-Team, Belvedere, Brocktoon, Facts of Life, Growing Pains, Howard Hessman, Murphy Brown, Saved by the Bell, To Close for Comfort, TV
We are supposed to use this assignment to dig deep and reveal something about ourselves, and in the process probably learn something about who we are along the way. Sadly, I don’t have any juicy stories to tell about a misspent youth or public urination. I’m just your typical white, middle class, average guy. My closets are filled, not with skeletons, but cobwebs.
I really only have one thing that I don’t let people know, most of the time, and that is because it is more embarrassing, then anything else. For you see, I have a slight problem (or maybe its a gift, who the hell knows) and that is my memory. For some reason, I usually can’t remember where I put my shoes, how to factor radicals or the number of States in the Union, but I have no trouble calling up useless facts about 80s and 90s television shows. Who’s the 23rd President? No clue. Who played Boner on “Growing Pains”? Andrew Koenig. Did I remember to pick up my wife’s dry cleaning? Nope. Do I remember the name of the comic strip that Ted Knight drew in the sitcom “To Close For Comfort”? Yep, The Cosmic Cow.
As you can imagine, this can be quite frustrating for those around me. It is very rare that I am able to make use of my almost encyclopedic knowledge of “Saved By the Bell.” Nor do plot points from A-Team episodes ever show up on finals. In fact, I once had a teacher return a paper to me because I didn’t follow the spirit of the assignment which was “Write about a teacher that inspired you.” I wrote about “Head of the Class” teacher Charlie Moore played by Howard Hessman. I guess the fictional teacher of a mish-mash of honor students didn’t inspire my teacher to give me an “A.” Or maybe it was just because he was older and would always view Howard Hessman as Johnny “Fever” in “WKRP in Cincinnati.” I’d like to think it was the latter.
My wife has told me that I should seek help for my little problem, but that seems ridiculous. I can’t sit across from a shrink and pay her $80 dollars an hour on this. Sure, the first woman I can remember being sexually attracted to was Nancy McKeon or Jo on the “Facts of Life,” but does that make me crazy or just a little gay? No, for I alone must bear the cross of watching the nightly news while secretly wishing that Jim Dial was the anchor and any minute he will go to Murphy Brown for her interview with the Secretary of State, and then back to Frank Fontana for sports.
About now you might be thinking to yourself that I just looked all this up on the internet. I wish. I wish this shit wasn’t constantly speeding around my head faster than John Wesley Shipp can eat a giant bowl of cereal or taking up more space then William Conrad aka The Fat man in “Jake and the Fatman.”
But where do I go from here? Should I regress further and pen a threatening letter to Ben Stiller about how I loved is wife Christine Taylor first when she was Melody on Hey Dude! or tell you that I believe that old Mr. Belvedere episodes are a better source of life lessons than the “Bible?” (Yep, I attend the Church of Belvedere and while my religion might not be a sanctioned one, it is the only one with a theme song by Leon Redbone. )
I’ve been this way all my life. In fact, when I was a little I wrote the people at FOX to tell them I was very upset that a Dodger game was on after school, instead of the next episode of Batman. It wasn’t Batman the Animated Series either, it was the 1960s Batman. I didn’t realize that what I was watching after school every day was actually reruns of a show what was canceled 20 years earlier. I thought I got a new episode ever day and was pissed because the last one was a cliffhanger in which Batman and Robin were replaced by the Penguin Protection Agency and due to a series of unfortunate events become fugitives themselves and when they show up at the Penguin’s pier carnival to set things straight, the get captured by the Penguin’s henchmen and strung up behind some balloons. Then low and behold Commissioner Gordon and Chief O’Hara show up and are going to shoot pellets at the balloons to win a prize, but the no good Penguin has replaced the harmless pellets with real bullets. REAL BULLETS! So I tune in to see how it all pans out and what do I see? Jose Offerman bobbles the ball and doesn’t make the play at the plate. I was pretty pissed off, as you might imagine. It wasn’t until months later, when they re-aired the episode, that I learned that the Dynamic Duo had bulletproof soles and their shoes and blocked the bullets by kicking them.
So there you go. That is my dirty little secret. I love old, bad television. Love it so much that if I could be any fictional character, it wouldn’t be Batman or Superman, but “Three’s Company’s” Larry Dallas. Why? Because Batman and Superman never it on with twins. Thank you and goodnight.
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