TV Cultivates a Garden of Earthly Delights

The first two questions people ask TV critics are “How much TV do you watch a week?” and “What do you watch for fun?”

I don’t know how other critics handle it, but I’ve never been able to figure out how much TV I watch a week, so I just pick a figure between 25 and, say, 100 hours. But as to what I watch for fun, that’s easier. And yes, although TV critics may seem mean and cranky, they still watch plenty of TV because they want to, not because they have to.

Many of the things I watch for fun are, fortunately, great shows that many critics, as well as viewers, have praised to the skies: “Seinfeld,” which is faltering without its co-founder Larry David but still funny in ways that seem wholly its own; “Frasier,” with its near-perfect cast doing agile parlays from wittiness to zaniness and back again; and “The Drew Carey Show,” which somehow manages to be broadly goofy in subtle, sneaky ways.

Other extremely reliable sources of merriment: “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” MTV’s cheerfully inane “Singled Out,” the new season of “Sesame Street” on public TV, old movies on the Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics channels, Jay Leno’s monologue on “The Tonight Show,” and the first 15 minutes of “Live With Regis and Kathie Lee.”

Merely surfing--doing laps around the channel lineup with your remote control--is the most fun way to watch TV now, for critic or for normal person, especially during those long oodles of hours when there’s nothing on worth watching in its entirety. And now and then, the diligent and tireless surfer will come upon a complete surprise that knocks him happily for a loop.

Surfing my local cable system the other day, I experienced just such a loop knocker. I stumbled across the NASA channel (available on some systems in parts of the country) and found it was showing hours and hours--and hours--of footage of the Earth shot from an orbiting space vehicle.

It was as close as most of us will ever get to really being up there, the definitive act of Getting Away From It All.

I found myself watching, and watching, and watching, then loading and reloading the VCR to record hour upon hour. And now I have a stack of tapes labeled “Earth From Space” that show nothing but our fine figure of a planet from various angles and locations and distances.

Maybe this isn’t exactly “fun” viewing, but from now on, whenever life gets too abrasive or, for that matter, whenever television gets too abrasive, I can pop in a cassette and look at the Earth and blissfully zone out on this literally heavenly sight. It’s not just peace on earth, it’s peace as earth. It’s earth as peace.

Thank you, Lord, for television.