Woke up at my usual time, started to get up, then realized I didn't need to go to work today. So I flipped the TV on, just to give myself some background noise as I drifted back to sleep.
And realized how comforting it is to have a rerun of Three's Company at 3 AM.
Lord knows, I never watched this thing--actively avoided it, in fact--during its network run. But the passage of time has somehow granted the smirking double entendres and rock-bottom production values a certain charm. And seeing the late John Ritter, a gifted farceur who never quite got the great role he deserved, looking so young and full of promise, lends it a terrible poignancy.
It seems like a half-understood transmission from another place and time, so different somehow from our world of now. Did we really accept set design that wouldn't pass muster in community theater as a viable reality, or recoil from the over-bright lighting? Did we notice the palace-sized living room and question what apartment could possibly hold it? Did we fear the pasteboard walls would collapse during a particularly frenetic moment of door-slamming?
For that matter, did we ever, however briefly, allow ourselves to be fooled into thinking we were watching actual human beings in an actual environment, or buy into the dilemmas of these characters? Did we think the smutty sex talk was ever funny, or connected somehow to actual human feelings? Did we laugh when poor, impotent Mr. Roper brought a malfunctioning power drill into the bedroom for no other reason than to allow his frustrated wife to comment on his non-functioning tool? Was that supposed to be funny, or profoundly depressing?
Sometime, as my eyes glazed over and I drifted to sleep, I realized I was using Three's Company for the very reason it was created, as audio-visual wallpaper, something painless to have on in the background, a video-induced coma. That's how we used to watch TV back then. Or so it must be assumed, given the evidence the show itself presents us. Surely no one watched this to be entertained. Did they?
