I don't get it. I

I don’t get it. I have this compulsion to watch Six Feet Under on HBO now. I don’t have cable (but recently I’ve thought about getting it). I don’t even get local TV stations. My TV is solely for DVD/LD/VHS playback. Last week, I caught about 4 or 5 episodes at hotels I stayed at. Tonight I finagled a TV with HBO just so I could watch the new episode.

At the end of each episode I think to myself “Well that was nice.” That is to say “I don’t think that was great, but it was better than most things I remember from the years when I watched TV regularly.” My compulsion to see it is not driven by the enjoyment I get from the show. A gap exists between my enjoyment and the need to see it. There must be some greater societal drive at work here. Some need to fit in with the masses that have made this show a weekly ritual. That is, to be specific, the masses that HBO tells me watch the show.

Sure the show has won me over by playing Built to Spill songs, showing snippets from the wonderful Terrence Malick film Badlands, and quoting from C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. Is that just an example of me happy to have found someone I fit in with? “Oh that writer likes the same movies , music and books I do. I’ll watch his show because it makes me feel like I fit in with someone.”

Maybe I just wish my life came in new sixty minute episodes every sunday with beautiful fades to white to punctuate when things are changing.