Television = Emotional Porn?

Happy Monday morning to you all.

I was just wondering this morning, why has the television become such a success, available in 98% of American homes, watched for over three hours a day by the average American, eventually eating up almost nine years of our lives? What is it about tv that has so captivated our imaginations?

Here are the top five reasons I think we love the idiot box:

5) We Just Can't Look Away - yes, whether it's the excess and ensuing conflict of Housewives, or someone eating a bowl of cereal on Big Brother, or the 130 pound tumor with teeth and hair and a partially formed ear, sometimes we just can't look away.

4) Knowledge - some folks just like knowing stuff. I think most of us do. So whether it's in order to feel informed (World News) or smart (Jeopardy) or the opposite of naive (20/20), the television feeds this basic desire in us to be in the know.

3) Entertainment - let's face it, most of us spend our lives in a cubicle, staring at a screen. By the end of a long day of emails and meetings and work, we want something different. We want our emotions to be stirred. We want to laugh or cry or feel something, anything, and the deeper the better. Anger, horror, disgust, joy . . . these things awaken in us when we watch television in a way that seems not to happen very often in our normally pedestrian lives.

2) Comraderie - how many shows now have us choosing sides, rooting for someone, taking a team on as our own and then following the result? Survivor, American Idol, Biggest Loser, every single sports league, all those makeover shows? We trash talk other people's favorites if they are not ours. There is something in all of us that wants to choose a side, and win along with them. Example - I recently trash-talked an Eagles fan, mentioning "our 6 Super Bowl rings." What? Our rings? Last time I checked, I don't have a single Super Bowl ring.

And the number one reason I think most people watch television . . .

1) Anesthetic - this may sound like the complete opposite of #3, but hear me out. I think a lot of folks watch television because real life can be so messy and tiring and painful, and at the end of a long day, surrounded by our troubles, sometimes the easiest thing to do is let an outside source entertain us and help us forget about what's going on. Which would you rather do, spend time working on a messy relationship or watch a two-hour program that helps you forget about it and then go to bed? Spend a few hours talking to your spouse when you know things aren't going so well, or safely, without communicating, watch a bunch of relational freaks on tv that make your marriage feel not-so-bad? Engage your teenage kids and find out about all the crap they're involved in, all the tough stuff they're facing, or watch television together and feel like a family? Work out for months so you're in shape enough to compete in a local sports league, or just sit around and let the NFL stimulate your need for competition (ouch, that one hit close to home)?

In some ways, I think television satisfies our need for emotional stimulus the same way many people use pornography to stimulate their sexual desires. Both allow us to escape real life and experience something we want to experience from a safe distance, in a predictable way, and all in a medium over which we have complete control and can turn off whenever we want. The alternative takes too much effort or requires a level of vulnerability we are not prepared to encounter.

Hey, I don't know, maybe I'm completely off base. What do you think are the real reaons we watch television? Having a good laugh? Excellent script-writing? Engaging television shows? Something more innocent than having a base human desire fulfilled?