Three Weeks of Great TV

​My wife and I watch so little TV that we might be liable to be exiled by a future national government as un-American. Of course, we hope that such a government will be soundly thumped in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. A landslide of that kind would do the heart and soul as well as the country good. So, getting to our viewing habits: First, most of it takes place on Rocky Mountain PBS. To be sure, even public television has in recent years supplemented its periodic fundraising drives with actual commercials. And viewing ads on commercial television is a major turnoff for us. Thanks to the legacy of the individual the Sesame Street characters referred to as Alistair Cookie Monster, we generally limit ourselves to shows on Masterpiece. Besides that, I’ve been watching the PBS News Hour from what seems like its very beginning, going back to MacNeil- Lehrer. Nowadays I generally limit myself to the 20-minute news summary, to leave psychological room for 50 minutes of Grantchester or All Creatures Great and Small...

Starting in late July, however, we found ourselves glued to the tube day and night. For a few days over two weeks the object of our attention was the Paris Olympics. Now the summer Olympics are a once-in-four-years phenomenon. Miss them at your peril. As retired folks, moreover, we have time for both daytime and evening viewing. Even clocking an average of seven hours a day, though, there were whole sports we missed. The Best of the Olympics that NBC’s Peacock made available every night really offered only highlights, the best of the day in the producers’ opinion. One thing that fascinated me was the number of athletes of color, including mix-race individuals, that competed not just from countries with darker-skinned populations but from the mainly white Scandinavian countries, France, Germany, Holland, and Italy. Many of the American stars were mixed-race. Only sports like swimming, except in the case of China and Japan, and the equestrian ones seemed the purview of lighter-skinned folks. We were not spared commercials, to be sure, but even these seemed to feature people of color, a testament to the increased buying power of our increasingly middleclass BIPOC population.

​When the games with their beautiful views of Paris ended, I felt a palpable sense of loss. But we didn’t have to lament for long. Soon enough came the Democratic National Convention, showcasing its deep bench of established and upcoming stars, spiced by the likes of Coach Kerr, Oprah Winfrey, and Stevie Wonder, not to mention Republican leaders who just couldn’t vote for the GOP’s ticket. Again, we found ourselves in front of our TV day and night. Besides Michelle Obama, the big stars were the late-entry individual topping the ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris, and her selection for VP running mate, Tim Walz (pronounced “walls”), the Nebraska-born everyman Governor of Minnesota. They were the Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky of these Games. The good news is, Cedar and I were not so let down when the 100,000 patriotically colored balloons dropped. The excitement and optimism have continued. My sense is that the Don of all dons and his lieutenants may find themselves on the losing end of a landslide. As the venerable Captain Jean-Luc would say, in this case to the better angels of our American nature, “Make it so!”

Multi-Gold medalist Simone Biles

And her teammate, multi-Gold medalist Katie Ledecky

And the top-of-the-ticket Democrat candidates with their spouses.