The T.V. Show That Ate My Brain

– and the ones that still may.

When I moved back to Texas to look after my dad, I had a lot of “Oh, just shoot me now” moments. Like every day at four p.m. when we had to watch “Walker, Texas Ranger.” Back then Daddy was still capeable of working the T.V. remote, and in fact maintained a death grip on the thing the rest of the evening. And of course since he had to crank the volume up, there was very little chance of escaping Walker’s grasp anywhere in the house. And it was not like he’d never seen the show before.

Pop was big on repetition. He had read every Perry Mason mystery ever written… at least a dozen times. He claimed he didn’t try to remember how they turned out, so they were just as fresh to him the next time he read them. If they were anything like the T.V. show, he wouldn’t even need to remember particulars.

I can’t think of more than a handful of Walker episodes where the girlfriend/lawyer didn’t get carried off by the bad guys and have to be rescued. She made it through law school, could apparently handle herself in a hostile courtroom, but couldn’t pick up a wrench and clock a guy upside the head — had to wait for mister kung-fu asskicker to rescue her. Oh, please. Let me just open a vein.

But watching television was about the only thing I could do with my dad by then. Conversations were out. Even when he could still hear reasonably well, he wasn’t much of a listener. As his hearing got worse, he just got mad at everyone for not speaking clearly enough. I remembered that when my mom was still alive, she just nodded a lot. I decided if it worked for her…

I also got in the habit of jumping up at every commercial break to go do something I was actually interested in. I worked on a lot of things piecemeal. My sanity level hovered right around the edge.

So what’s ironic is that every day at four p.m. I tune in to the SciFi channel to watch re-runs of Star Trek Enterprise and Stargate SG-1. How many times have I seen them? It doesn’t matter. There are no NEW shows going off-planet these days, so I have to get my outer space fix any way I can. And anyway, what’s up with the no new space operas? I can’t remember a time in recent years when there hasn’t been even one series that took place on a space ship, a space station, or a distant planet. Until Stargate Universe fires up this fall, I’m going to keep watching these re-runs. I wonder if my dad was watching Walker because all the shows like Gunsmoke and Rawhide and Wagon Train were gone extinct. For my money, Walker was a sorry-ass substitute anyway.