I Miss Television

I do have a satellite dish, but the channels originate out of the Philippines, which means for every "good" station like HBO (which I loathe, incidentally) there are four channels broadcasting evangelical Catholic programs, such as Family Mass and Mother Maria TV. Most feature a motley collection of priests and nuns in tropical-weight habits (think shorter sleeves) and occasionally, if you flick through the channels fast enough, you will see the same priest giving a talk or singing mass on two different channels to two different audiences. The timing is set for the Philippines as well: the screen may show that it's really showing The Glee Project 2, but what's on is a tagalogized version of Red Dawn. ("Ka barkada mo, motherfucker!") Just today the screen announced it was showing Family Mass but it was actually broadcasting Party Philippinas, a sort of Girls Gone Wild with everyone keeping their modest bikinis firmly in place.

I do miss television. I don't enjoy Chinese tv, largely for the reason that I'm not a moron. I have one channel that shows some American television (I love New Girl) but for the most part, it's reruns of the most loathesome TV show ever, next to Alf and Small Wonder, namely, According to Jim. Ugh.

The time has come for me to go back to teaching, which means 14 hour days, coming home to walk the dogs, eat dinner, and crawl into bed exhausted. I won't be sitting around following Idol and eating potato chips while drinking diet Coke: it's far more likely I'll be coming home with a suitcase full of laminated letter shapes that need cutting out for tomorrow's opening activity. However, it IS nice, particularly as an expat, to have a weekly show to anchor yourself to the rest of the world with: how nice to watch Big Bang Theory, for example, and to be able to chat with your friends back home about it without a year-long delay. We seek as expats to adjust ourselves to a new world daily: how can we do that when we don't have some ties to home? If we cut ourselves off from our own cultural literacy, one which expands and changes daily, we risk becoming stuck in our old experiences, knowledge, and expectations. Our language becomes stale and outdated.  We become That Expat, the crazy lady with a goose in her purse, saying "groovy" and "beautiful" and "marvelous" and blinking uncomprehendingly when someone says, "Jealous much?"

Is it too much to ask that China gets one channel going for expats (and Chinese) which actually shows real American shows? For god's sake, it could be Donna Reed, The Brady Bunch, and Dark Shadows 24/7 for very little money.  I wouldn't complain. Classic comedies from the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties would do more to enhance the English language acquisition of the local population than any thousand broadcasts of CCTV English Outlook (which is now a show on food anyway.) I don't want to have a satellite dish anymore. I would watch Chinese tv if there was even one single channel that showed anything good, however outmoded.