The cable con

The cable con

by Garrison Frost

The letters and postcards stopped coming a year or two ago. For a while there, we were certain that we were on some kind of list compiled by the cable industry. I could just imagine Joe Whats-his-name, the CEO of Cox Cable sitting at his desk and asking himself, “Who are these Frost people? How can they resist my cable television packages? What are they, savages?”

But alas, with the rise of the Internet and satellite, our household just isn’t all that unique anymore. Still, when I tell friends that we don’t have any of these things, they tend to look at me the same way they look at people who tell them they don’t eat cooked food.

My wife and I, however, aren’t making any grandiose statement. We're not going to make some strident case about childhood obesity and physical activity (although we certainly could). We just see cable and the lot as just stupid, a tremendous waste. Pay TV might be the only service in the world that actually provides less benefit the more you add. Really, the Golf Channel? ESPN2? The Home and Garden Channel?

But what about the sports? I am asked often, as though I need to absorb Division IIA football at 3 a.m., or hang on every shot in a Wednesday basketball game between the Atlanta Hawks and the Milwaukie Bucks. No thank you. Sports on cable are there for a reason, and it’s not because everybody wants to see it.

Back when cable first arrived for real back in the 1980s, I remember the thrill when we finally got it installed at our house. The videos on MTV changed the way we listened to music, and being able to see movies that had just left the theater in our living room was beyond belief. Well, now MTV doesn’t show videos anymore and movie channels don’t show movies.

The new trend of movie channels producing their own shows has got to be the biggest con of all. No matter how much praise we heap upon “The Sopranos,” “Entourage,” “Battlestar Gallactica” and “Mad Men,” these are still merely TV shows. Sure, they use the F-word and women take off their tops like they do in the movies, but it’s still really just TV. And you know what? There’s a lot to watch on TV already. I don’t need more TV shows. There are already more TV shows than I can reasonably be expected to watch in a single lifetime.

And don’t even get me started on the news. Really, if you’re still getting your news from the tube, you were left behind long ago. Fox, CNN, MSNBC – it’s just a bunch of lunatics yelling at us, yelling at each other. It’s not news. It’s not even opinion. It’s more like plant life – uninteresting repetition, bland visuals, severely content impaired.

We’ve got rabbit ears on top of our television, and we only get channels 2 through 13. And that’s plenty. When there’s nothing but crap on, the last thing that crosses our minds is to call someone on the phone and order more crap. No, we do the most sensible thing. We turn it off.

(Nov. 15, 2007)