They’re line up on the futon sorted by size, like jays on a high-tension wire. They stare slack-jawed at the screen while blues, reds and greens dance across their faces in the semi-dark. The laugh track punctuates the snappish dialogue, teenaged voices breaking in alternating cadences; Hannah Montana, Pair of Kings, Wizards of Waverly Place.
These TV kids are older and cooler than our four kids. Flippant insults and clever retorts have muscled into our older children’s vocabulary, loan words from pillaging barbarians, teenage sitcom Vikings.
My wife Maria and I have the normal love/hate/then-hate-a-little-longer attitude concerning TV. We badge up when a conversation turns to TV, claiming to have not even owned a TV for several contiguous years; but especially when our babies were small and there were a lot of them, and a good night’s sleep was pleasant fiction, nothing made the nut as well as a late-night bag of Cheetos or a box of Ding-Dongs and back-to-back episodes of “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”
We had been watching a TV we got at a bizarre electronics sale held in one of the old Seattle’s Best Coffee buildings several years ago. We pawed over heaps of retail-returned electronics, piles of broken TVs, DVDs, speakers, cash-only, no returns, no questions.
Our TV was classified as functionally fine — “works!” scratched in Sharpie on a piece of blue tape — but its grey plastic cabinet was in a pile of pieces. When we got it home, I duct-taped it together, and years later tape and TV are still strong; we’ve since gifted it to a couple new to the Island who didn’t need much in the way of a TV, either.
Maria’s family are solid Midwestern farmers, corn and beans and the Blessed Virgin, and they have a fabulous custom of bestowing large sums of money to one another at Christmas. This year, we took her family’s generosity and sunk the entire amount in a gigantic TV, plus a game console that our youngest boy begged us to buy, prostrate, his arms wrapped tightly around my ankles. The shopping decision was this: If we’re going to actually buy a TV, we’re going to buy the biggest TV they have. We’ll be all in.
And so we are all in. The gigantic TV paired with an unlimited Netflix account has made it possible to watch, for example, every Storage Wars episode consecutively. Our kids hold hours-long, sugary after-school Hannah Montana festivals. The spectacle of Billy Ray Cyrus dad-swaggering his way through his one-note Achy-Breaky part is completely lost on our four.
Just like having all these kids, the idea of Family Movie Night began innocently enough. Maria rented “The Sound of Music” and talked of having a Family Movie Night. Her concept was simple: We would all watch an ancient, heart-warming family show while eating buttered popcorn and thinking clean thoughts. The first Family Movie Night was a sappy, sentimental success, and so there were several more, a series: “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang,” “Swiss Family Robinson,” “Singin’ in the Rain.”
But after a while, the Family Move Nights started to drift off course. The kids began programming the movies, and they changed the format slightly to more closely align the playbill with their tastes in theater.
The new-breed Family Movie Nights hold the entire family, including both adults, captive for a series of derivative grade-school kid’s movies, full of poopy-potty bathroom humor, pie-in-the-face reaction shots and dizzying computer-generated graphics and choppy editing: “Home Alone II,” “Mr. Popper’s Penguins,” “Spy Kids” 1 through 3, number 4 in 3-D.
Family Movie Night is still satisfying, sitting together and admiring the fine digital sheen of our huge new TV. However, the unfortunate reality of the current format is that the movies are often so puerile that Maria and I find it hard to sit still for the whole thing, without fidgeting with our phones or actually packing in laptops to get work done.
At times the movies are so bad they fail to hold the attention even of our youngest kids. They’ll play provocateur, standing in front of the screen so no one else can see, waiting for a reaction, or draping themselves across their brothers and sisters, fomenting unrest on the futon. The last half-hour inevitably drags past bedtime and a couple kids usually drift into sleep.
After the credits, I hog-carry the still-sleeping kids up the stairs. It’s getting harder to do that; we’re all getting a little older.
— Kevin Pottinger and his wife Maria are the parents of four children.
