Accessing cultural memory with Roku ‘Live TV’
Armin Rosen
There are attics of our lives, as the Grateful Dead sang, but perhaps the more important detritus that selfhood is composed of doesn’t loom so closely above us and hides in places that contain none of the grandiosity of song. There are storage units and desk drawers of our lives where experience also accumulates — we forget where we put everything and whether it’s even there, only for this mental substrate to spill into consciousness in unbidden and ungraspable moments. Sometimes, the dead matter flashes to life long enough for us to see that we’re actually made of old Simpsons quotes and rap lyrics and tertiary high school friends we’ll never see again. These eruptions are usually not pleasant, and they can be a gutting reminder of how short life is, how much time has already gone by, and how poorly we’ve put it to use. “Everything’s worse when you remember it,” Homer Simpson once said.
Homer’s wrong, as usual: Memory doesn’t make everything worse. Recently, I made the amazing discovery that you can safely spelunk the dark caverns of thought and self on a culturewide scale, at least if you have a Roku box. Toggle over to where it says “Live TV,” a feature that hides out on the streaming hardware the way the words to “Laffy Taffy” hide out in your mind, and let the journey begin.
Among the hundreds of free channels on offer are ones that run nothing but episodes of Dance Moms, Doctor Who, Degrassi, and Divorce Court — and that’s just in the D’s. There are channels devoted to human triumph: You can watch a youthful, weirdly petite-looking Joe Rogan bully models into eating cow brain on the Fear Factor channel, while on True History, channel 473, I once caught a single-camera recording of a lecture about Alexander the Great’s imperial policy toward Persia. And there are channels devoted to human frailty, such as the endless march of the Fail Army on 810 or the 24-hour national pageant on 815, which presents a patriotic infinity of America’s Funniest Home Videos. On channel 953, you can watch Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting every second of the day ― dubbed in Spanish.
It is fun to pretend that the channels’ lineups are all looping into the indefinite future, such that Ross, the late Cold War Air Force hardass-turned-hobby painter who now leads an endless art-themed guided meditation on channel 465, would continue crafting his post-human dreamscapes long after the warheads detonate and the last one of us drops dead from radiation poisoning. Roku TV, ignored in its own time, could then become a cultural ark for the American subspecies of the human race. For instance, the aliens would discover at least 15 channels dedicated to crime, perhaps our greatest national pastime, airing such lurid spectacles as The Psycho She Met Online, Stepmom Murder Trial, Ice Cream Man Murder Retrial, and Dateline. They’d see the uniquely American drama of judicial hauteur, attempted empathy, procedural tedium, and parking enforcement that unfolds in Judge Frank Caprio’s mesmerizingly low-stakes courtroom in Caught in Providence, another show that never ends.
And occasionally, the lonely invaders would see the best of what we had to offer — not just ceaseless reruns of high trash like Jersey Shore but also whole channels of high-end middlebrow mainstays such as Mystery Science Theater 3000, and even stuff like the Howard Hawks classic Ball of Fire, which I paused on the other day. The intrusion of actual class into the subterranean psycho-spiritual exclusion zone of Roku TV seems unwarranted to the point of indecency. Seeing Barbara Stanwyck charm a mansion full of pencilheads on Samuel Goldwyn Classics, channel 326, just a few hundred down from Mountaintop Motel Massacre on AMC Thriller, is a bit like having a good friend of the opposite sex walk in on you plowing through a garbage bag of kettle corn.
Would it be so bad if it were all trash? We, as people and as a society, are at least some-percentage trash. It’s like corn syrup — it’s a part of us. One channel runs nothing but Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction?, a late ’90s Friday night placeholder on Fox, now beloved as Jonathan Frakes’s only notable non-Star Trek role. My family watched it together when I was a child. I lingered over Frakes’s grimacing voice of truth, deception, and existential resignation: “…Or maybe there is no explanation,” Commander Riker posited of one man’s thwarted romance with a possible ghost. No point in sticking around when one of the dozen or so sports channels was rerunning the 2005 North Carolina State-North Carolina football game, billed in the program description as “Mario Williams vs. The Tar Heels.” Williams, a Wolfpack defensive end, was the first overall pick in the 2006 NFL draft and would go on to be selected for four Pro Bowls. The Heels had the ball with a 7-point lead and 2 1/2 minutes left. Anything was possible, just as it had been on that long-ago Saturday afternoon. Perhaps Williams was seconds away from a colossal strip-sack.
I realized I could look up how the game ended, but why would I? I do not watch Roku TV for certainty or for information or even strictly for entertainment. The pleasure of it, I realized, comes from the quaintly fire-hose-scale packaging. Actual TV, whatever that now means, is vaster and more wasteland-like than ever, and the internet is too oceanic and impersonal to have the contours of anything resembling human life. Roku TV gives direction to the hugeness of existence, allowing you to draw the pleasure of recall and discovery from events of obscure meaning that happened 18 years ago. (There was no strip-sack, by the way.) After the game concluded, I studied Miley Cyrus dancing alone through an arc of lawn sprinklers on an MTV music video channel before flipping to Wild Earth, where gerbils copulated on the African savanna.
At its best, Roku TV brings you in contact not just with things you forget you remembered but with things you discover you remember without ever having seen them in the first place. Was Johnny Carson actually funny? I wondered, being in my mid-30s, and realizing I wasn’t even sure what the guy looked or sounded like. The answer lies on Channel 345 every minute of the day, and the answer is yes. It also turns out I’d been hearing Carson my entire life, through just about anyone who’d hosted live network television.
The elf-faced Carson was slyly deadpan, studiously unsmiling, intangibly capable, and strangely hard to read — a bit like that student in high school who got straight A’s and all the girls without being an obvious genius or a great athlete or a jerk, except Carson was permanently 55 years old. Carson looked and listened. Everyone else on his show behaved as if they were on television, but not him. He knew the medium well enough to transcend it in real time.
Thus, on a random night in 1974, Carson and his frequent guest David Brenner kibbitzed with the actress Madlyn Rhue, whose hair seemed to take up the entire soundstage. As a teenager, she’d been fired from a nightclub dance ensemble because she forgot the dance to Ravel’s Bolero and did the Charleston instead. “I said gut yuntiff to the owner,” she recalled. “He hired me back!” Then, an invisible invader arrived to hijack the segment: a fly. Soon, Carson was wielding a novelty swatter as if it were a gavel and baseball bat.
The whole thing is uproarious, phenomenal television. In fact, it’s too phenomenal, and my reptilian secondhand memory of the former king of late-night became an embittering statement on just how hollow his modern-day successors are, the umpteenth piece of evidence that mediocrity has conquered us. Next up, the Carson channel ran a highlight of the Tonight Show host needling a pre-White House Ronald Reagan on CIA reform. “You wanna speak into the ashtray and tell me privately?” he quipped as Reagan deflected his questions. Do late-night studios even have ashtrays onstage anymore? On Roku TV they do.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter at large for Tablet.