YOU ARE WHAT YOU WATCH

“What do you watch?” It is no longer a lazy way to redirect a boring conversation. Questions about viewing preferences have become fraught; the topic is as intimate, revealing and potentially off-putting as discussing how much money you make.
It’s a rich television age and a demanding one. And deciding among hundreds of channels, on-demand options, Internet streaming and iPhones requires so much commitment. Alliances are formed, and so are antipathies. Snobbery takes root. Preferences turn totemic.
Lost still finds devotees, but the momentum of the masses has switched to Heroes. Prison Break has a small but impassioned following, The Office is one of the best comedies yet the truly finicky insist it can’t hold a candle to the original British version.
Some events are momentous enough to draw everyone’s attention. But mostly, television is a toppled Tower of Babel, scattered snatches of conversation about a multitude of shows.
This doesn’t mean that the era of network television as a national shared experience, when everyone watched, say, Dallas is over. Certain shows, most notably American Idol, bring together a huge audience. But it’s the lesser-known series that inspire the most fervid loyalists.
Generation DVR doesn’t know what a new fall season means or how to keep appointment television. I know because I have a 14-year-old daughter who sometimes consents to serve as an ambassador to Planet Youth. “There is no one cool show,” she snapped. “Everybody watches different things. I can’t help you.”
Most people have shows they admit to watching only after a self-deprecating preamble that frames the speaker as charmingly eclectic, and not a lumpen viewer. People have become curators of their own television consumption, seizing lofty rationales for why they keep tuning into American Idol, (cultural anthropology).
It’s the mass-market fare that is harder to explain.
Many people in the culture department of this newspaper never watch television unless it’s an adaptation of a George Eliot novel on Masterpiece Theater. But one of the smartest editors I know once admitted, after a few drinks, to going into his study when no one else was around and watching Reba. I am paid to watch television. I am not ashamed to say I try never to miss Mad Men and 30 Rock.
Television used to be dismissed by elitists as the idiot box. Now people who ignore its pools and eddies of excellence do so at their own peril.

NYT