Television, Explained

The main television was in the family room. Usually the main television was large, in comparison to other televisions around the house, say, a twelve-inch black and white atop a kitchen counter, or, in some luckier, more fortunate homes, a fourteen-inch color console injecting a guest bedroom with blue-green light. Families gathered in front of the main television for meals, usually dinner, sometimes lunch, rarely breakfast, which, as everyone knew, was meant to be eaten around the kitchen table, the way people ate breakfast on television. Upstairs televisions were for late-night watching, or insomnia.

If you wanted to know what was on television, you could look up the schedule in the TV guide, which came with the Sunday newspaper, or you could check the daily paper, if you had one on hand. But the most popular option was to turn the television on and click through the channels, seeing what you could find. This took some time since most channels showed nothing but static. To click through them quickly, you had to know which channels actually broadcast a signal. Knowing the channels was an important part of watching television. That way, you could click through channels 3, 6, 10, 12, 17, 29, and 48 and say, with exasperated authority, “There’s nothing on.” Saying “there’s nothing on” was the most common thing to say about television. That, and “It’s all commercials!”

There were two kinds of television channels, VHF and UHF, which stood for “Very High Frequency” and “Ultra High Frequency,” but hardly anyone knew that. What people knew was that the important channels were on VHF and the not-so-important channels were on UHF. Ask a television watcher today what VHF and UHF stood for, and that person will likely say, “VHF stood for CBS, NBC, and ABC; and UHF stood for McHale’s Navy.” CBS, NBC, and ABC were major networks, while McHale’s Navy was a largely unfunny situation comedy about a group of wisecracking sailors who got in and out of various scrapes. No one liked McHale’s Navy, but everyone watched it anyway. That was another important part of television: watching shows you didn’t actually enjoy, either out of boredom, lethargy, or the unlikely belief that, if you just kept watching, the show would eventually get better. Whole summers were consumed this way. Years, even.

Here’s something that happened once in a while: you would visit someone’s home and see their television, and you would think there’s the television without actually realizing you were thinking that. And sometimes the television would be showing the same shows you watched on your television, and you would think they watch the same shows I do. And this feeling would come over you that you and the other person had so much in common, so much connection, so much to share, and it was all somehow because of television. But then the moment would pass and you would forget about this feeling you could not explain.