Out of the box.(THE STRAGGLER)(television)

DID you catch the last episode of The Sopranos? I missed it. Worse yet, I missed the entire Sopranos phenomenon--have never seen a single episode, nor even a fraction of one. Matter of fact, there was another program on that night I wanted to see: The Tudors. Afriend had told me this was great fun: a glossy, botoxed updating (he said) of those BBC historical dramas of the early 1970s. I loved those: Keith Michell lurching around in cloth of gold, cheeks padded out like a hamster, Glenda Jackson snarling "God's death!" at Robert Hardy. I wanted to see The Tudors.

I didn't get to, though. Both The Sopranos and The Tudors are shown on premium cable, which we don't have. My cable company wants a $4.95 monthly fee for HBO, and we don't feel like paying that. It's not, or not mainly, because we are tightwads. We're just TV minimalists. We have only one set in the house, a 15-yearold Sony XBR in the living room. We don't watch it much.

This isn't so much anti-TV snobbery as just a failure fully to internalize the TV habit. Both adult Stragglers grew up in TV-free environments. To be sure, we both subsequently made friends with the medium. There is plenty of TV I am glad I watched. For amusement, there was that great mid-1970s CBS Saturday-evening lineup of Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, and Carol Burnett; for instruction, Kenneth Clark's Civilisation series; for narrative pleasure, those marvelous BBC costume dramas. Middle-aged human beings often slip back towards childhood mental habits, though, and I watch much less TV now than formerly.

That puts me at a disadvantage in conversation. I seem to be the only Sopranos virgin in the U.S.A. Even the founder of this magazine has written a column about the show. Being TV-challenged has recently left me at a loss in political conversation, too. Never having seen a single episode of Law & Order, I had to rack my brains to recall anything at all about Fred Thompson.

More than that, I am aware that having an attitude about TV is singular in itself. Any attitude at all, I mean. Pretty much nobody under 50 has an attitude towards TV, any more than they have an attitude towards the sky. TV is a thoroughly integrated part of their consciousness, internalized at a very early age. Their infant brains re-wired themselves to incorporate TV in the a priori background of existence, along with (according to Kant) space, time, and arithmetic, and thereafter they have never needed to think about TV, in fact are probably unable to.

People like Mr. and Mrs. Straggler, who grew up without a TV in the house, are stuck with having an attitude about it. TV is a thing we notice, a thing we think about. Back when most adults had had TV-free childhoods, TV was a topic of argument, a focus of opinion--not merely for the content of particular programs, but as a thing in itself. It featured in stories and novels, as a character.

Bruce Jay Friedman wrote some particularly memorable ...