The Fascination of a TV series

Having a TV in my childhood was a privilege of a chosen families. Not every house had it - because you could only get it with permission from your professional union, and then, you had to wait months or years for your turn to get one from the electronics store. I never had neither TV nor video at home. But my grandparents, who already were retired, had a huge TV in a box made of polished wood with 6 buttons on it's side.

Television was playing such an important role in our lives, what we knew by heart all TV schedules for all (or, better to say, for both existing) TV channels. Every Sunday we had cartoons - and exactly in five minutes to four somebodies mother was giving a sign in a window: “Cartooooons!” - and the whole crowd of kids was running to one of a lucky TV owner, to watch 45 minutes of 30 years old Donald Duck series.

Even now, I still have no TV at home. I don't have a habit to stare into blue screen for hours after the evening meal. Sometimes I feel envy, when I see images of a happy families, sitting altogether on the sofa and watching something - I cannot share their joy, they know something I don't understand.

I still remember the very first TV series I saw. It was an endless Brazilian story of a poor slave girl, suffering in from the power of plantators with her happy marriage with one of these evil guys in the end. In original this series were about 200 parts long, but it was adapted for NEISKUSHENNYJ TV watchers into 13 sequence long story - and, believe me, it was the longest movie I've seen by that time.

Times were changing, cheap latinamerican and even first local series rushed into the fight for a place in front of TV watcher's eyes. For me TV schedule turned into the lottery: unpredictable mess of unknown shows and programs. I was lost in a world of 100 pages thick weekly TV "forecasts".

And when the new technology came to change this world. Digital TV and Internet based channels gave the opportunity to create own TV playing lists, full of favorite programs and shows. And that was a time when TV finally got me on it's hook. Now I could watch TV right at my working desk - in a small window in the upper corner of my monitor. Some people prefer radio, some people listen to music, but I trace the main line of TV adventures of my favorite serials. I don't have to wait for a next part, I can watch all of them in a row, season after season, I can stop it anytime I want, I can rewind it to see some special moment, or I can just send it to the background and just listen to the dialogs.

As a person, who's not used to waist time in front of a TV, I enjoy my new way of watching TV. New genre of TV series, wrote and shoot especially for a young non-teenagers isn't worth to watch it seriously, but they are perfect as a background noise while I'm working. In some sense they imitate a sound of an ocean behind my windows, they give a light scent of a breeze to the air, and a touch of adventure to my routine work. Lost islands, ordinary life of superheros, mega-attractive workers of casual services, such as police, library or pizza delivery became my close friends and neighbours.

So, exactly as Ray Bradbury wrote in his "Fahrenheit 451", TV shows becoming members of a families. They replace all these people who was surrounding us in archaic villages, they feed our urban hunger for a human relationships.