TV, our window into other worlds

So we’re watching “Clifford the Big Red Dog” on PBS, and if you don’t know the show, the premise evidently is that when you give something love, it grows and grows. Hence, an ordinary red dog becomes very big.

“That’s why Clifford is so huge?” I ask.

“Yes,” my wife says.

“Then, why aren’t all dogs huge?” I ask.

“It’s a cartoon,” my wife explains.

More and more, I’m having trouble distinguishing between cartoons and real life. This is because they are becoming more like each other. Soon, everything will be animated. All dogs will talk. Wile E. Coyote will run for governor.

In the meantime, the baby and I will eat our cereal and watch morning television, awaiting the merger of art and life.

“Sit down,” I tell him.

“I’m not sitting,” the baby insists.

“I think you are,” I say, lashing him to his seat.

I now use an old necktie to secure him in his highchair. I wrap it gently under his armpits like a training bra, then around the back of his chair. This is in addition to his regular highchair seat belt. Like many babies, he’s sort of a highchair Houdini.

“Let’s just Velcro his little butt to the seat,” I say.

“Shushhhhh,” my wife says. “Clifford’s met a new friend.”

The baby sits back in his highchair soaking all this up. Every once in a while, he throws me a sideways glance that says, “I can’t believe you’re making me watch this junk. Can’t we turn on ‘SportsCenter’? How’d the Hornets do?”

“Does he just sit here watching PBS all day?” I ask my wife.

“No, in the afternoons I read to him,” she says.

Like that’s going to do him any good.

TWO DAYS LATER, I’M WATCHING AMERICA’S favorite TV show, with the little girl. Most of the contestants are unattractive, untalented, often both. Many of them go on to Round 2.

“He stinks,” the little girl says of a singer who just finished.

“Dawg, this just wasn’t your night,” one of the judges tells the poor sap.

After a mere 10 minutes of “American Idol,” you come to realize we are not that talented a nation. Is it the lack of music programs in the schools? Or simply bad taste? We seem to produce only tone-deaf screamers. Our car horns are more musical than we are.

On “American Idol,” the amateur performers’ fingers flutter. Their voices quiver. Who can blame them? When they are done, three judges of dubious distinction tell them how pathetic they were.

Our reality shows seem to be trying, with some success, to feed a growing lack of civility in American life. In many of the shows, people are duped or treated in insanely rude ways. The victor is often the biggest cheat. Which I guess is why they call it “reality.”

“I love this show,” the little girl purrs.

Apparently, everybody has a favorite show.

On SUNDAY, MY WIFE IS WATCHING THE FINAL episode of “Sex and the City,” the female Super Bowl, while holding a baby who prefers to nurse upside down. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

“How did you even get here?” Sarah Jessica Parker asks the man of her dreams.

“It took me a really long time to get here, but I’m here,” he says.

“Kiss me, crybaby,” she says.

If you don’t know the show, the premise evidently is that when you give something love, it goes a little insane and runs off to France with a boyfriend old enough to be Mikhail Baryshnikov. At least that’s what I get out of it.

In this episode, Parker traipses around Paris, while her friends deal with their own lives back in New York. Believe me, since she left, nothing has gone right for nobody.

All I know is that people on TV never actually watch TV. Most don’t even seem to own TVs. Marshall McLuhan would’ve probably had a better theory, but my take is that producers figure that people worth spending time with seldom watch much television.

I attempt to explain this new theory to my wife, but she is too entranced with this show to hear. For three years, she has been tuning into stories of love and lust among these four “Sex and the City” women. Four oversexed women who never really work. Who never clean their apartments. Who prowl the streets of Manhattan at all hours for shoes and men, in that order. This is how far feminism has come.

“I get it!” I finally blurt out. “Women have become like men!”

“I need more wine,” she says, handing me her glass.

As you may have heard, this is “Sex and the City’s” final show. After this episode, the boob tube will have eight fewer boobs. Which is a true loss and something from which our nation may never fully recover.

In the show’s final moments, Miranda the redhead deals with her ailing mother-in-law; Samantha the tramp falls in love; Charlotte the goody-two-shoes adopts a baby with a man who looks like Maggot in “The Dirty Dozen.”

And Carrie? The biggest Cinderella since Cinderella falls back into the arms of the love of her life, Mr. Big. How he got to be known as Mr. Big, I’ll never know. Maybe when you give him love ... oh, nevermind.

“I guess I’m your Mr, Big,” I tell my wife as the show draws to a close.

“Absolutely,” she says.

So long, “Sex.”

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Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.