WATCHING TERRIBLE TELEVISION IN ORDER TO BE CLOSE TO SOMEONE YOU LOVE
“It was our happy hour,” my friend Faith said, about watching Malcolm in the Middle with her scratchy teen son. “It was just us. Only we two got it. It was the only time we really got to be together.” She said friends came over and left, promptly—Malcom was just too weird. “You don’t have to worry!” Faith told her best friend. The friend was horrified the sitcom baby was careening across ice “Nothing will happen to the baby. It’s Malcolm! You just go with it!”
I remember my friend Jill, watching Baywatch with her preteen son every evening. At first, I was horrified and aghast, in front of the kid and Jill. “Sit down, take another look,” Jill said. Her tone was cautioning, it said close your mouth, open your heart. ‘We really like it, actually,” she said. And I was struck by her love for her son though I couldn’t actually watch that show. I was too young and had no children of my own, no feelings to fit this experience. And then, I met Junior and Everybody Loves Raymond and Jacob and Charmed. And watching the show gave us a freedom square, a proxy world, a place to be close and strange and laugh and sit and know something. It actually feels to me a lot like church, story triggering a communion of soul.
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