My favorite TV show
When I was in elementary school, I had two favorite TVs shows. (Hey! You have to WAIT for it BEFORE you start making fun of me.) First, I loved Star Trek: The Next Generation. Okay, no, the storylines usually made no sense, the characters tended to be cardboard-flat, all the aliens spoke the same language–or else their languages were astonishingly similar to ours that mouths formed all the same sounds our language does–EXCEPT the Vulcans and Klingons, for no reason that made any sense, and of course everyone fought to the death with less physical protection that a football player would wear much less an actual soldier, and the engineering problems and solutions were such a regular deus ex machina that it was almost a joke….but I still liked it. And, yes, at the tender age of nine, I thought that prat Wesley Crusher was cute, though, in my own defense, almost entirely because he was smart. So sue me.
But my other favorite TV show was by far the more embarrassing. I loved…Murder, She Wrote. An editor I knew laughed so hard when I confessed this that she nearly peed. She asked me, “What was it you liked so much? Angela Lansbury’s hair or her BICYCLE?”
Well, honestly? I loved that she was a writer. It didn’t matter that the only writing that ever took place was in the intro, when MURDER, SHE WROTE was typed out on a blank white page by a typewriter. It didn’t matter that even my third-grade self could often solve the ridiculously contrived mysteries before Jessica Fletcher could. Everything was forgiven because of the mere fact that Jessica Fletcher wrote books.
Now, I’ve run across many writers warning would-be novelists that writing isn’t riches, glamor, and booksignings. But I never really had that image in part because of Jessica Fletcher, who lived in a modest house and made a modest living in tiny town. And solved a murder weekly, of course, making the murder rate for that small town rather higher than the worst part of Gary, Indiana. But I sort of imagined a real writer’s life to be something like Jess’ without the bodies dropping dead everywhere–quiet, private, unpretentious, retired, and perhaps a little cutesie and a little dull.
The reality is, thankfully, a bit more interesting than that, in no small measure because of my intrepid three-year-old. (All I have to say is that if HE ends up writing, too–any bizarreness or creepiness in his books is Not My Fault. Example? Earlier this week got out a flashlight and pretended it was a UV light and checked my hands for blood to see if I had killed anyone recently. His words. What kind of imaginary world does this child live in, in which his mother regularly kills people???? I prefer it when we take a frigate spaceship to Pluto… No one ever dies or is maimed on Pluto… At least so far.)
So, what embarrassing TV shows did you love as a kid?
Oh and can’t forget the soap Another World. Watched that every day after school
