Reflections of a New Parent on Television, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About My Street Cred and Love Terrible Television

"Really, Mom? Bent? You're embarrassing yourself."

Everything changes with a newborn (duh!), including one’s ability to love and loathe television programs. Having spent the last six weeks caring for a tiny, crying, needy, eating machine (plus a baby- hey-o! Sorry, Chris), I have experienced first-hand the desperation and shallowness with which a new parent engages with the electric story box.

There are a few factors that impact my television choices these days.  First, I’m nursing a baby, and that means I practically have a tiny, but voracious dinosaur attached to me for like six hours a day. This leaves me wanting several things from television.  First, that it is on when I’m nursing. Constantly. Otherwise I fall asleep, make up songs about sore nipples or unyielding baby poop avalanches, or start styling my poor son’s hair like various celebrities (Jersey Shore regulars, Brian Williams, and Justin Bieber are inspirations).  Constant television means that you run out of “top tier” options quickly, and become a hell of a lot less discriminating. Second, it’s May.  That means all my favorite shows have wrapped up the airing of new episodes for the season. Third, I spend a lot of time with my beautiful television in the wee hours of the night, when (ruling out infomercials) the buffet of delightful cable offerings features slim pickings.  Like, really slim. Like, the buffet closes in twenty minutes, and all that’s left is one tough, overly-sauced riblet under a heat lamp slim.

However, even with these limitations, I find postpartum television watching to differ from my pre-parenting habits.  I’m a little more desperate, infinitely more tired, and I can’t commit to an hour-long program with much consistency.  I also can’t focus on complex plots (or, let’s face it, even moderately interesting plots or serialized shows).  Sorry, Mad Men, Community, and Veep, the oscillation between subtle humor and wacky plotlines are too much for me these days.

I believe all of this will change with time, but in the interim, I’m enjoying watching shows I hadn’t (had to) before. So, for all you new parents, bed ridden caretakers to small monkeys, or inattentive insomniacs out there, here’s my take on what to watch (or begrudgingly accept) during this time of immersion into dumber television:


Canceled Shows: New shows still available on On Demand or Hulu that have already gotten the boot from networks are the awesome hook-up buddies of TV.  They’re generally unsatisfying and leave you feeling cheap, but they meet your immediate needs without the fear of commitment.  It doesn’t matter if the baby cries relentlessly or I’m running to wash spit-up off the couch, because I don’t care at all about the characters, and the long-term narrative of the show promises to end abruptly and disjointedly anyway.  I particularly recommend GCB and Best Friends Forever for a steamy one-season stand.




Cooking Competitions: Available on live television 20 hours a day, food competitions make for pretty, superficial viewing pleasure.  Only have 15 minutes of calm from the baby in your arms?  That’s just enough time to find out who lost the appetizer round, and what the X durian fruit is.  Also, food. Is. Delicious. If I can coordinate watching one of these shows with actually eating something, I feel particularly self-satisfied. Once, I caught myself saying “Jerksica, for the win!” during one of these moments, and my son gave me a pitying frown.  He’s so smart, he’s judging others at a nine-month level. I recommend Chopped, Iron Chef, Cupcake Wars, and Sweet Genius.  Sweet Genius is especially good for 2:00 a.m. feedings, when the equally cloying desserts and host, conveyor belt of ingredients, strange accent, and intensely weird props match my own late-night delirium.




Old School Sitcoms: Great (and not-so-great) sitcoms are on in syndication somewhere on your remote 24 hours a day.  They’re also mindless, occasionally funny, and nostalgic.  I don’t identify any more readily with the parents on Roseanne or Home Improvement that I did pre-baby, but I appreciate a well-delivered one-liner from the family matriarch or a slapstick accident with installing a home security system just as much.  More even, depending on how sleep-starved I am on any given night.  Plus, if I can find any humor in a circular saw getting the better of Tim Allen, I can definitely navigate any bodily function Baby throws my way.  And if not, I can always console myself with television.

Guilty Pleasures and Guilty Feelings: GCB (by Sam)

I think the phrase “guilty pleasure” gets tossed around a lot, so much so that now it means “I pretend to ironically like such and such a show because it makes me feel better about the fact that I actually like it.” But I honestly feel guilty that I enjoy watching GCB, that I laugh out loud at Kristen Chenoweth, that I view each of the show’s plot points as a logical progression from the previous one, that I turn off my capacity for critical thinking and just enjoy. I mean, take my other guilty pleasures: True Blood, Teen Wolf, Skins. I can tell you why I love each (Sookie is so sassy and Eric is so gross and hot! It’s puberty and sexual realization in a werewolf metaphor! They make bad decisions but they really care about each other!) and I can tell you why each is trashy and trite. But when asked what I think about GCB, I can list a litany of things that I hate about it—it’s misogynistic, it’s formulaic, it’s one-dimensional—with only a few things I like—it’s funny and the men are hot. And yet, I keep watching! WHY?? Is this what it’s like to enjoy television without ruining everything by deconstructing it? What a terrifying world we live in! No, but really. I’ve spent as many weeks as the show has been on thinking about what I’m going to write about this show. I have a Word document full of half started paragraphs about how anti-woman the show is, about how Texas is apparently filled with painfully fit men that all have the same tan color-tone with varying levels of hairiness, and about how the show challenges the hypocrisy in Christianity without challenging Christianity itself. I even tried to compare it to Mad Men, friends. It went something like this:

 “Man Men is also condemned as being horribly sexist, that it romanticizes a horribly oppressive time for women and minorities. But Mad Men is inspired in its representation of women because it never at any point implies that any of the female characters could break out of the horribly constricting constructions that society places them in if they’d just try harder. Even in the forth season, when Peggy is talking to the hippie guy about African-Americans and she says, ‘Maybe if they worked as hard as I did, they’d be where I am’ (I’m paraphrasing), it emphasizes not how far Peggy has come from her hard work, but how far she hasn’t. Despite the fact that her brains and gumption have gotten her this position in the firm, she is still asked to get the men their drinks, she is still judged by the size of her breasts and the shape of her legs, she is still referred to with the pointedly sexist language of “frigid bitch.” By portraying complex, strong, intelligent female characters painfully constrained by unconscionable gender roles, being infantilized and exploited, it doesn’t glorify the system that put them in those roles; rather, it forces the viewer to ask, ‘What kind of sick world do we live in if even women that incredible are seen as weak, stupid, or somehow unworthy of respect?’ If we transfer that lens to a show like GCB, can’t we see these misogynistic creations as symptomatic of a world that created the Real Housewives and…ummm…pity them?” 

See how that didn’t quite work out? The fact of the matter is that every time I sit down to write something thoughtful or even just funny about GCB the insipid subject matter leaves me with nothing. I can talk about how Kristen Chenoweth is hilarious as always, or how I think Annie Potts plays a fantastic matriarch (though now I’m thinking about Reba and liking it more). But then I’m just ignoring the terrible misogyny running rampant throughout the show. But the worst part is, I ignore that very thing every time I tune in. It’s soulless, mindless entertainment without the redemptive catch-all of irony. So I’m not going to encourage you to watch it. Just know that, if you don’t, I won’t judge.

 If this is what having a real guilty pleasure is like, I gotta say, it’s pretty rough.