I was standing at a stoplight with a few MFA students after my fiction workshop let out, making small talk about how we were each planning to spend our Thursday evening. A group of them were getting ready to grab a quick bite at the student center before driving half an hour to hear our state’s poet laureate give a reading. I confessed—bad teacher—that I intended to go home, put on my pajamas, and watch the premiere of Parks and Recreation.

They laughed, and one said, “I don’t think most of the students will admit to even owning a TV.”

“Oh, I own a TV,” I said. “And I love it. It’s one of my favorite things.” (Actually, my husband and I own two.)

Now, this TV, the alpha—my husband’s doing—is a 42-inch flat screen that sits on a table at the head of our living room with every piece of furniture in the room reverently arranged around it. For years I lived in conflict with myself and insisted we house the television in a cabinet with doors, and the last thing I’d do before company came over was shut those doors, as if to say, “Oh, that thing? I forget we even have it sometimes!” No more. Why pretend? We let the television breathe.

The television in my childhood home was always one of those now-extinct cabinet jobbies—the kind that housed the screen in a handsome wooden box so that it could occupy its stately place along with the coffee table and end tables. I was what folks of my generation would now call, with amusement and perhaps horror, a “TV baby.” Rare was the moment when the TV wasn’t running in our household. We ate most of our meals in front of it. We read books in front of it. (I come from a family of voracious readers, which gives lie to the commonly held assumption that TV kills a love of reading.) I played dolls and blocks along to reruns of The Carol Burnett Show.

I was eventually gifted with my own little black-and-white television for my bedroom, and since we didn’t have cable, I spent many evenings moving the rabbit ears so I could sit about two feet from the screen and watch snowy, impressionistic renderings of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Beverly Hills, 90210. Late at night, strange things came on: Home Shopping Network, infomercials for the Psychic Friends Hotline, Benny Hill. Imagine a 10-year-old rural Kentucky girl watching, perplexed, as a British man in a thigh-high Robin Hood costume frolicks across the screen and raises his arms, comically revealing his bare buttocks. I thought I’d stumbled upon pornography. I leaned in closer.

I still don’t have cable, but rarely am I afforded that eye-opening, boredom-driven pleasure of scanning channels for weird finds. Our digital television just refuses to show us a picture if the signal isn’t adequate. No, with the exception of a sitcom or two such as my beloved Parks and Rec, my obsession now—which seems to be the national obsession—is with binge-watching television series, most of them on Netflix streaming or downloadable through Amazon. My husband, a design professor and visual artist who last read a novel for pleasure during a week-long power outage, loves most of the same shows I do, and television is the meeting place between his interests and mine, the visual and the narrative. When we find a show that hits our mutual sweet spot— Homeland, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Justified —we can hand over months to anticipation, speculation, and spirited post-viewing post-mortems, during which we marvel at the audacity of a plot twist, the frustrating specter of sexism (Walking Dead, is it too much to ask for an interesting female character?), the coolness of a Starbuck or Sherlock Holmes (as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch).

I love the public dimension of television watching almost as much as I love the shows themselves. It’s an experience I can share not just with my husband but with a community more diverse than the literary writer types with whom I usually talk about such subjects as “narrative arc” and “character development”: colleagues in other disciplines, people I went to high school with, my 21-year-old little brother. TV babies have something to teach the readers among us about passionate engagement. They get it wrong sometimes; the weirdly sexist backlash against a character like Skylar White is proof of that. But television, even really smart TV such as The Wire and The Sopranos, invites discourse from every quarter, and I’d wager that most of us posting about The Breaking Bad final season didn’t talk ourselves out of a Facebook post or comment out of a fear of offending or sounding stupid, though I’ve talked myself out of posting about books more than once for those very reasons.

So, that’s me: a TV baby-turned-unapologetic TV adult. And I’m bringing this to an abrupt conclusion because it’s time to eat steak and watch The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror XXIV.”

+