Probably the original Star Trek series was the
first time I fell in love with a TV show in the same way that I was already accustomed,
at eleven, to fall in love with books—with my whole entire self in such a
fashion that the show and my love for it became a part of who I was. It was
also my first encounter with a difficulty that swirls around this kind of love
for television that is usually absent from the same powerful feelings toward a particular
book. When I love a book this way—when I clutch it to my chest when I’m done
reading it, when it stays with me always, when it is in some way me—I get
a copy of it to keep forever. Maybe it’s a particularly nice copy and maybe it
isn’t, but I have a physical copy that I can set on a shelf and be pretty sure,
barring some manner of house-destroying catastrophe, that it will be accessible
to me forever. If I need to read Harry’s decision to enter the Forbidden Forest
again, I can. If I need to watch David and Alan take on Hoseason’s crew from
the captain’s cabin, no problem. If I need to hear Jane tell Rochester that she’s
no bird, I have but to take the book down from its place on the shelf and crack
it open. And the thing is, getting that book in the first place, with
rare exception, is easy. If I have ten or twenty bucks, I can get the thing and
have it forever.
Rewatching my favorite moments between Kirk and Spock
was a lot harder in 1992, when my only real access to them was through the
reruns our local PBS affiliate ran on Saturday nights. I recorded them on VHS—a
somewhat cumbersome and anxiety inducing process (what if I set up the recording
wrong?!)—but even so I was restricted by which episodes the station chose to
air. And keeping those recordings for later viewing was kind of a
nightmare. If I recorded them on a slow speed to get as many episodes as
possible on one tape, the recording quality was crap and would deteriorate
fairly quickly. Record at a faster speed and only two episodes would fit on a
tape. Even a show with a pretty short run like TOS still would run to forty VHS
tapes to keep all of them. Not exactly tenable, especially if one likes *gasp*
more than one TV show enough to want to be able to see it again, just as
one likes to read favorite books again.
All this is much easier now, of course. Blu rays take
up much less space than VHS tapes, and streaming means that you can “have” a
whole show without it taking up any of your space at all. But here’s the thing—that
all feels so very, very impermanent. Shows disappear from streaming services
all the time, when the copyright agreements between the distributor and the
service run out. And a blu ray can break or get scratched or degrade. Or…
someday, owning a blu ray player will probably be like owning a VHS player is
now—increasingly uncommon and eventually, probably, impossible. Those VHS
copies of TOS I recorded nearly thirty years ago are pretty much worthless now.
I don’t know how I would watch them, and they are probably nearly unwatchable
anyway, having sat around losing little bits of data for decades. But the copy
of The Hobbit my dad read to me when I was six is just as readable and
just as lovely now as it was then.
It’s too bad, I guess, that we can’t really pass
beloved visual media down like we can books, but what really puts a shiver down
my spine is the thought of truly losing the ability to re-experience these texts
that mean just as much to me as my favorite books do. I feel like so many of
them are largely considered ephemeral and of the moment, while to me they are anything
but ephemeral. I’m two-thirds of the way through watching Supernatural
for the first time, and I know that this is one of my texts now. I’ve fallen so
deeply in love with it that it is part of me, just as Jane Eyre, and Kidnapped,
and Harry Potter are. I’m watching it on Netflix, but I also bought the
blu rays. I’m not trusting that the show will be there ten years from now when
I need to revisit it. But are those blu rays any better? Will they work in ten
years? If I drop my copy of Jane Eyre in the bath, I’m always going to
be able to go get another one. If blu rays don’t exist anymore when I’m sixty,
will Warner Brothers have bothered to distribute SPN in whatever way is ubiquitous
then? I shudder to think.
What TV shows mean as much to you as your favorite
books? Which would you be devasted to no longer be able to watch?
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