Compass & Quill

One of my earliest memories is of a TV show. Not Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood (though I certainly remember both of those shows fondly), but The Jeffersons. I watched that show religiously every afternoon, around the time my Mum was fixing dinner. One day, just before the show was about to start, our TV gave up the ghost. There was a big POP! and a fizzle, and the television was no more. This was the early 1980s, so the working parts inside of a television were a lot different back then. Either way, it was time to get a new TV. In later years, I was to experience a similar situation where the television died, and my then boyfriend calmly walked out of the house, went down the street to the Best Buy a few blocks away, bought a new TV, and was back in less than an hour. But when four-year-old Anna pitched a fit about the television breaking, demanding that her mother drop everything she was doing and go find a new TV in time to watch The Jeffersons, she got nothing for her efforts.

In my memory, my Mum was actually pretty cool about the whole thing. In her customary “this child is nuts, there’s no fixing this situation, OK, let’s keep a cool head” way, she frowned (even her forehead got involved in the effort – my Mum has a very expressive countenance), explained that televisions were expensive and I should get used to not having one, then immediately went back to doing whatever she had been doing in the kitchen. I got the point – mostly that one more word out of me would mean punishment. Obviously, I was upset (no “Weezy!” for how long???) but I got over it. Who knows, maybe losing George Jefferson was the impetus behind me becoming a champion reader. Or maybe not. I don’t remember how long it took for my father to buy a new TV, but it couldn’t have been that long. I can’t imagine him going without the old boob tube for longer than a few days, max.

Tonight I was thinking about television shows that I’ve absorbed over the years, and how in some ways, I’m composed of them. The favorites have stuck with me for an awfully long time. It might mean nothing, or it might mean just the smallest bit of something. I’m sure it means less than a lot, but more than zero. So it felt right to start collecting those shows here. I’ll stop waxing ridiculous and just start the list, in more-or-less the order I remember watching them in:

1. Sesame Street
2. Mr. Rogers
3. 3-2-1 Contact
4. Lassie
5. The Jeffersons
6. Fraggle Rock
7. Pound Puppies
8. Sanford & Son
9. Garfield & Friends
10. Star Trek: The Original Series
11. Captain Power
12. Family Ties
13. Benson
14. Silver Spoons
15. Miami Vice (NB: I didn’t watch this show, but vividly remember it in regards to my relationship with my mom, who watched it religiously.)
16. The Cosby Show
17. 227
18. The Storyteller
19. Perfect Strangers
20. Alf
21. Growing Pains
22. The Pirates of Darkwater
23. Different World
24. Full House
25. M*A*S*H*
26. Quantum Leap
27. Star Trek: The Next Generation
28. The Simpsons
29. Head of the Class
30. Fresh Prince of Bel Air
31. Blossom
32. Days of Our Lives
33. Passions
34. Saturday Night Live
35. Saved By the Bell
36. California Dreams
37. MST3K
38. Pop Up Video

(I’m stopping at high school for the night…I’ll come back to finish this later.)