Stage actors love theater. Film actors find movies. Musicians dig concerts by their fellow musicians. But TV performers just don't appear to catch much TV, according to an unofficial survey spanning years of interviews I've had with them.
Let me stress the not-at-all-scientific nature of this poll. Among the stacks of TV stars I've talked to, I ne'er made a point of grilling them on their TV consumption. I don't recall how often it came up.
But over clock time I started to actualize (and wonder) that, out of everyone who did address the issue with me, fewer than a dozen of them copped to being TV fans.
The rest: Well, they don't shun just now the programs they come along in. They don't take in TV, period. Or so they claim.
Why would they blind themselves to the truth (TV's vision of the true statement, anyway, which they're all part of)?
They're busy! They have to be up early and they work late! Those are explanations I've been handed.
Besides, later on spending so much time in the candy manufactory (I'm paraphrasing here) they just don't have a sweet tooth anymore.
Some stars make a rare exception to the no-TV rule. Maybe they watch line news, perchance ESPN. Who knows? Maybe they're unavowed a peek at the Olympics. Maybe the smart comedy of the moment ("The Office," or, ahead that, "Seinfeld.") or the fashionable drama (early in its run, I'd often hear "ER," and and so, for a number of years, "The Sopranos"). Or maybe an admitted hangdog pleasure like "The Amazing Race" or "Project Runway."
Beyond that, it seems, they shut their eyes to what's on TV, at least when it's on. For them, apparently, watching TV is akin to slumming; offputtingly exotic; or, unaccountably, none of their business.
Of course, being a selective viewer isn't uncollectible. The median American logs 4 1/2 hours of TV per day, a sum that should arrange off the get-a-life alarm.
But many TV stars insist that catching up with even a program they confess to liking is more worry than it's worth. They claim to never be around a TV when that show is on the airwave. They look to have never heard of TiVo.
I've been hearing this kind of thing from TV-averse TV stars since long before anybody ever heard of TiVo. And I think it reflects the stigma that TV has been saddled with since birth - a stigma TV will still be stuck with when its convergence with the Web is fully consummated, and the term "television" is retired to the like place as "the wireless" and "gramophone."
Society brands people who are gung-ho around TV as mentally challenged, hopeless nerds or unsaved with likewise much meter on their hands.
Then TV shows reward those stereotypes. Who's more of a TV winnow than Homer Simpson (a fat, unambitious lamebrain), unless it's buster cartoon couch potato Peter Griffin with his madman brood on "Family Guy"?
A TV masterpiece regularly pegs its hero as a lowbrow channel surfer: Behold Tony Soprano in presence of his wide-screen TV, spooning up ice cream, as, heavy-lidded and impassive, he gazes at a war documentary.
Little wonder if TV stars think loving TV publicly would trauma their reputation. And never mind the irony that they mightiness choose to occupy their leisure time with loftier things than the TV programs with which they expect us to busy ours.
But, happily, that's not the whole story.
I experience come across a handful of TV stars world Health Organization, unabashedly, include themselves among the TV-watching masses - for example, Ricky Gervais, the gifted actor-writer-humorist, whose credits include "The Office" and "Extras."
"I live a very, very normal life," he told me a couple of years ago. "I walk to process. I walk back from work. I'm at home at 6 o'clock, in my pajamas watching television."
Does being British give him some special insight, or immunity?
Could be. But some other example is Philadelphia native Seth Green, who, at 34, has been acting on TV since puerility - besides watching TV.
"It's important to be cognisant of what's going on in your medium," he volunteered during a recent interview. "It gives you an indication of what you're doing right and wrong - or gives you something to throw off your clenched fist at, in defiance!"
Defiance is right. Among his diverse projects these days is "Robot Chicken," the subversely funny serial he co-created, which lampoons pop cultivation - especially TV. For Green, a lifetime of watching TV has paid off nicely.
And I stool name one more subject: Jon Hamm, a gaolbreak star on the acclaimed drama series "Mad Men."
"I've loved telecasting since I was old enough to reach the dial," he said non long ago. "Television is meaningful to me. It's frustrating and fascinating, all at the same time."
As Hamm wheel spoke, I couldn't help noticing a hound of indignation that anyone, least of all one of his peers, mightiness think otherwise. And though I failed to ask, I'm sporting he's acquainted with TiVo.
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EDITOR'S NOTE - Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org
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