You Can't Do That On Television

I hope it's okay to get your shit together the day before you die, because I think it's going to take me about that long.  There's all this stuff I'm supposed to be doing every day that I'm not doing.  Reading from the Big Book (that's Alcoholics Anonymous, not the Bible, in case you were wondering).  Writing stuff in my journal. Working on The Book (still not the Bible; just the book I'm working on).  Meditating.  Household chores.  Cat cuddling/paper ball tossing/feather toy flinging.  Honestly, adulthood is like a to-do list just never ends.  I get to the meditating most days, but the rest of it doesn't seem to happen very often.  Most days, when I walk in the door, I'm all up for sitting down to dinner, looking at my cell phone for a bit, then going the hell to bed. (Well, I get up at 4:30, so…)  

Apart from baseball, I'm trying to think when I last even sat down and watched a TV show.  Unless you count "The Dead Files," the haunted house show that Joan is crazy about and that puts me right to sleep.  See above re: I get up at 4:30. 

And it's too bad, too, because suddenly there are a LOT of good TV shows out there.  Once Netflix and Hulu started cranking out their own content, the gloves suddenly came off and everybody was making good shows. We got shows about music producers and we got shows about hair stylists.  We got "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" (again) and we got shows about what happens after you die (that aren't documentaries).  For a second there we even had a show about Van Helsing, but I think we can write that one off without too many regrets.

And in the middle of all this, we got "The Handmaid's Tale," and honey, this show is doing for television what "The Hunger Games" did for YA fiction.  If you thought it couldn't be done on television, "The Handmaid's Tale" has done it.  And I'm not just talking about sex and violence (yawn, how too too passe, dear).  I'm talking about subject matter that you couldn't get on TV before now.  This show is way beyond cutting edge. It's maybe 20 years ahead of where we are now.  (Maybe even in real life.)  Oh, and it also won a pile of Emmys, including a Best Actress nod for Elisabeth Moss. 

So why aren't I watching it, you ask.

Well.  That's kind of hard to explain. 

I watched the first season.  For the most part I watched it 20 minutes at a time, before bed, while falling asleep, but watch it I did.   Joan didn't like it so it never really graced the screen of the TV in the living room, but it looked just fine on a tablet.  (If you ever watch this show, keep an eye on the colors.  They mean different things. There's a lot of red in this show.  Lots of deep green, too.  Interesting.)  And it was riveting television. I mean it was edge-of-your-seat, nail-bitingly tense watching.  Even if you've read the book and you know what happened, you don't know what happened, because a TV show is a whole different universe and Just Because It Ended That Way In The Book Doesn't Mean It'll End That Way On TV. 

In case you've been hiding under a rock and you don't know jack about "The Handmaid's Tale," the story takes place in the near future.  There's been a war, the United States no longer exists, and most of the northern East Coast has been turned into something called the Republic of Gilead.  The birth rate is dropping precipitously all over the world; only one in every five pregnancies results in a live birth, and that's even assuming you can get pregnant in the first place.  There's no birth control, no abortion, no morning after pill, nothing like that--and the population rate is still dropping.  So the government of Gilead is hunting down all the women who have proven that they're fertile (previous pregnancies, an actual kid, etc.)  and turning them into handmaids--women who have babies for the elite households.  Doesn't matter if you had a job, husband, kids, family beforehand; if you're fertile, you're now a handmaid and your job is now to have babies.  Oh, and your children are taken away and raised by other people.  Gilead comes up with a religious explanation for how this is all okay, but they don't really need one; they're doing it because they can.  And because they're desperate. Something or other about the danger of the human race going extinct trumping individual rights.

And it's good.  As I mentioned, it's riveting.  But the whole second season is out and I haven't watched any of it. And I'm probably not going to, at least not for a while.

I blame Donald Trump.  

In all seriousness, I'm not supposed to be watching the news. The doctor even told me not to watch the news. He didn't specifically say anything about not going to news web sites, so I still do that sometimes, but without watching the news, I'm in a much better frame of mind. Because, frankly, all the news is bad.  And there's so much more of it than there used to be. Well, of course there is; something had to fill up all the news channels and Web sites and magazines that have been proliferating at a ridiculous rate since, oh, the advent of cable TV.  

I dunno about you, but I kind of like being in a better frame of mind.  It beats the heck out of the way I feel after I watch the news.  And the way I feel after watching "The Handmaid's Tale," as good as it is, is about the same, unfortunately.  It's a very hard show to watch.

This must be why parents don't want their children to watch horror movies.  (Though, personally, I think a lot of parents don't want their children to watch horror movies because they don't want to have a lot of conversations about man's inhumanity to man and what happens to us after we die with a nine-year-old. But I digress.)  In short, I'm trying to be an adult about this. And a Buddhist.  Precept Five is all about not consuming intoxicants, which includes certain TV programs and Web sites in addition to drugs and alcohol. (And gambling. In fact gambling is specifically mentioned.)

And, really, why would you want to consume something that's bad for you? You know, like heroin or cocaine or maybe lots of sugar. But people do. Fortunately for me,  it is just a TV show,  and I can stop consuming it by not going to a particular Web site. So that's easy.

NOBODY TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS. I still have this fond hope I can get back to it someday. And hopefully it won't jump the shark in the meantime, like "The X Files" did in season 4. Cheers!