When I had my first post-college apartment back in 1970 most of my furniture was the stuff that came with the rooms and some parental cast-offs. This included a console black and white television that I kept in the bedroom. Just above the screen I taped a bumper sticker that read "The whole world is watching the United States, and the United States is watching television."

I wasn't really all that anti-tv, although I fancied myself an "intellectual." Nevertheless, I was a big fan of "Laugh-In" and the "Smothers Comedy Brothers Hour" as well as the daytime soaps Days of Our Lives and Another World. I was too busy especially in my last two years of college to watch much tv. There were only four channels anyway -- ABC, NBC, CBS, and the fledgling PBS affiliate out of Hershey which went on the air in 1967. Reception was iffy, especially for the NBC affiliate, which was fuzzy even if you put the tv set near an open window and jiggled the antenna from time to time. Later I would become devoted to The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The ABC Movie of the Week, shown on Tuesday nights from 8:30 to 10:00. During my most severe bouts of depression (nearly all of 1973 and 1974 and on into 1975) I used television as a drug. If I'd had cable, I'd have never left the house.

I stopped watching soap operas about 1990, about when Stephen Nichols left Days of Our Lives. (I check on DOOL from time to time -- Bo and Hope were having the exact same conversation a few weeks back that they were having when I quit eleven years ago.) I still miss the talk shows of the early 80s, especially Phil Donahue. I first learned about AIDS from his show -- a family who had lost one of their twins at the age of three talked about this mysterious disease he'd gotten, apparently from a blood transfusion they didn't even know he'd had.

I've never seen Survivor and got bored very fast with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? For more than a decade, however, I've been a sincere fan of many of what I call The Ten O'Clock Dramas (even if they air at nine and are comedies). When I was working I'd hold out the delight of sitting down with a story as my reward for folding laundry, supervising Lynn's homework, and grading papers. Over the years I've loved Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Mad About You, thirtysomething, I'll Fly Away, and L.A. Law. Now I look forward to Third Watch and NYPD and ER as the bridge between my writing and reading work and sleep.

Ron enjoys them too, and it makes a nice way to end the day together. We do, however, use the experience differently. He does not by choice read any fiction but mine (as a duty, I think), and if every Ten O'Clock Drama would cease production and all reruns be banned from the airwaves, he would regard that fact for a moment and then move on to something else.

Once, the morning after a particular episode of ER, I said to him, "I can't believe Carol just let Doug walk away like that, that she didn't go with him."

"Who?"

"Carol and Doug. On ER."

"My God!" he hollered. "Are you still thinking about that? It's a show. It isn't real."

To me the characters in these stories are very real, and I tend to think about them and the ways they conduct their imaginary lives more deeply perhaps than is good for me. Ron, I think, uses the experience in the way it's meant -- an hour's diversion from real life.

It's "Season Finale Week" on most of my favorites. Last night I saw The Practice, which I think is past its prime (if it ever had one) and which had a really lame and over-the-top sentimental ending. In fifteen minutes I'm going downstairs for Third Watch, a show which had a really badly written episode a few weeks ago. (Yes, I see everything through a fiction crafter's eyes now.) Tomorrow is my beloved NYPD where I've supported the reuniting of Andy and Katie but am beginning to think it isn't going to work, Wednesday there's The West Wing and the funeral of a character who reminds me of what my mother might have become had she had more self confidence. Thursday I'm set for the Friends wedding with Lynn. We might be the only people in America who don't get HBO so we're not up on the current season of The Sopranos, having only recently completed working our way through the first season on rented DVD.

Later -- Well, I was wrong about tonight's episode being the season finale of Third Watch. There's one more next week, one with lots of shooting and danger and probably a cliff hanger. Tonight's episode was the kind I like the most -- character driven, a look at the inner life, a glimpse at how mature people work out the tension between desire and duty. I'm still thinking about how Faith discarded the pictures the talented photographer had taken of her because they portray someone she thinks she can't or shouldn't be, about how I'd have kept them, brooding in secret about roads not taken.

Probably entirely too much freight attached to something designed mostly to sell luxury cars and arthritis medication.