How Utterly Evil Is It to Watch TV? : Not wholly sinful, perhaps; but have you been feeling bored, tense and unsatisfied lately?

The other day in a restaurant lounge we came upon a group of well-dressed professionals, ranging in age from 30 to early 40s. As they imbibed, obviously celebrating some occasion, they spontaneously broke into joyous song--not school song, not popular song, but television song:

“ Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship . . . .”

These professionals of various races, and we assume, backgrounds, all knew the words, verbatim, to the theme from the mid-1960s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island.” Besides their jobs, that touch point may be all that they had in common. How distressing that should be is another matter. It was unvarnished testimony to the power of television and its pervasiveness in American life. Now thirtysomething adults reminisce about “Gilligan’s Island”; tomorrow’s adults may rhapsodize about the first time they saw a Paula Abdul video on MTV.

As it turns out, not all of this is as horrifying as literate persons might naturally think. A new set of studies by two University of Chicago psychologists shatters some myths about television watching. The research indicates that television should not be blamed for the drop in test scores and other social ills. Frequent television viewing by adolescents correlated, surprisingly, with good school performance. It could be that the mainstream, conventional values touted in the world of formula television shows help reinforce those values in teen-agers, the researchers said.

But some of the other myths shattered do not bode well for television addicts. Many have long assumed that television helps a viewer unwind after a long day. Actually, long hours in front of a television tend to make viewers feel passive, bored, tense and unsatisfied. Reading, although it requires more concentration, left readers with a greater sense of peace. The key finding there, researchers said, was that once people realize that they “need not reduce concentration and feel passive in order to experience relaxation,” they might choose more productive pastimes.

Finally, the studies reveal that highly educated people also watch a lot of television, and as we always suspected, it’s not all “Masterpiece Theatre.” But, the more educated people were, the more likely they were to feel guilty about watching too much TV.

We were going to say more about that, but, inexplicably, we suddenly felt too edgy and full of self-reproach to concentrate further. A little quiet reading time should do the trick.