GratiTuesday - Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few nights in a hotel. I was super excited about this 'working vacation,' and the room was very nice - a kind of studio suite with a desk, small kitchen area, and even a huge 42" flat screen TV that could swivel to be seen from nearly every vantage point in the room.

At first this was fun.  We cancelled cable a few years ago, and while we can pick up a few shows with our box-converter doohickey, we just don't want TV much anymore.  It was fun to flip through and watch some new things - creative treehouse structures and game shows and reruns of sitcoms I liked as a kid. I even found my favorite detective drama in reruns.

I gradually realized just how many channels I had to flip through to find these few offerings.  There were a zillion sports channels, great for the athletes among us, and lots of news stations, too; but then there were the channels playing the too-adult-for-me movies, the shows featuring men building great things but with half the words bleeped out, and soap operas with enough bed-hopping to warrant a list to keep track of it all.

At times, despite the vast hotel TV offerings, there was nothing to watch.

Now, I don't object to the news - except for the many tragedies reported on it - or sports shows, and either could have worked; but I'm more of a fiction girl myself.  Give me a good clean sit-com or a movie I've seen before and I'm happy.

Except those are, apparently, endangered species on network TV.

It makes me sad to see that, perhaps, there aren't many new shows being made that celebrate families and parental wisdom like The Cosby Show did.  Nor shows that aren't afraid to take strong stances on the difficulties of being a teen but also the strength of making the right choices like Boy Meets World did.  (I'm hoping the sequel does, but I probably won't be able to watch it either way.)

I would like to think that there are great shows being made that we could watch as a family should we decide to go the cable route again, but I didn't see much evidence of that this week.

Maybe they're out there.  Maybe I wasn't looking when they're on.  Maybe I'm just missing it.

We do enjoy watching 'the letters' (Wheel of Fortune) and sometimes Jeopardy.  For now, we'll just stick with that.

It was fun to have the opportunity to watch TV while it lasted.

But now, I'm happy to be back at home in my TV-free zone.

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