Love is a genuine solution. It breaks down barriers and repairs relationships. It invites in the lonely and defeats shame. It provides the lighted path to forgiveness, which sets everyone free. Love makes us brave, pulls up seats to the table, defuses bigotry, and attacks injustice. It is our most powerful spiritual tool. Do not underestimate it as the solution to almost everything that is broken.
We have only a few days on earth in the scope of history. We get one shot at this, one chance to live in a way that brings true honor to God, the great Lover of people. After Jesus’s sacrifice, we became the cornerstone of His plan to embody good news as living demonstrations of His character. It is a humbling task with eternal consequences, and may it be said of our generation that we loved well. Just like we were taught. Just like we received.
Makeup can only make you look pretty on the outside, but it doesn’t help if you are ugly on the inside. Unless you eat that makeup.1
— AUDREY HEPBURN
CHAPTER 9
MY SOUL MATE NETFLIX
Gather round, young ones, and I will tell you a tale that will frighten and confuse you. It will sound like something from the Dark Ages, ye days of old. You will wonder: What sort of life was that? How did they survive? Those of us who struggled through will tell you stories of triumph, of heroic juggling; you will gain a new respect for your ancestors born in the seventies.
See, once upon a time, there was no such thing as Netflix. No Hulu, no Primetime on Demand, no Apple TV, no Amazon Instant Video. These were fantastical inventions of a time well past the year 2000 (which, in our imaginations, included hovercrafts and time travel). We had what was called “basic cable,” which meant that shows aired on four channels on a certain day at a certain time. And that is the end of the tale.
If you wanted to watch, for example, Magnum P.I. with your mom, then you had to be parked on the couch on Thursdays at 8:00 p.m. or miss Magnum and T.C.’s shenanigans while Higgins tried to maintain some bloody decorum. You got one shot at your show, and if you got home late because your mom’s Jazzercise class went long, then you had to call your friend for a recap. Side note: Young Ones, telephones were attached to the wall with a cord back then, so you stretched it into the pantry for some privacy, away from your mom’s nosy interference, while hollering, “This isn’t Communist Russia, Mom—or, should I say, GORBACHEV!” (This is how children of the Cold War aired grievances.)
Back then, there weren’t channels dedicated to subcategories of the population. There was no Disney channel, no Food Network, no ESPN, no Bravo. There was Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings, and, my personal crush, Tom Brokaw on the news, and we got cartoons for three hours on Saturday mornings until CBS switched to golf at 11:00 after the Smurfs. Oh sure, MTV hit the scene in 1981, but we couldn’t watch it because of the devil. Apparently we could watch a show starring two outlaw brothers, their half-naked cousin, and a car painted with the Confederate flag but couldn’t watch Madonna sing “Like a Virgin” because we might get secondhand pregnant.
We got a taste of the future when VCRs finally became affordable for regular people. We could tape our shows! We set it on top of our enormous console TV encased in faux wood and perched on a fancy swivel. The only teeny downside was that our model didn’t allow us to schedule the recording; someone still had to put the tape in and press record as the show aired. This involved panic, calling your neighbor, and begging her to break into your house to press record so you wouldn’t miss Moonlighting while you were at church choir practice. And heaven help if she accidentally taped over The Masters, because Dad would relaunch a dissertation on proper labeling and respect for intellectual property.
I probably need counseling over the tape situation. For a while, VHS tapes only had two or three available hours, so you’d throw in a half-used tape to record Kids Incorporated, come back later that night to watch it, and it would cut off right in the middle of a crucial moment when Stacy (i.e., Fergie) considered smoking a cigarette given to her by an unsavory traveling rock band member because she was sick and tired of being treated like a child, like we all were, man. Did she smoke the cigarette? Did she become an addict? Did Gloria and The Kid talk her out of it? We never knew. (The online synopsis of Kids Incorporated says: “A group of kids sing songs at a club for kids. They solve problems in between performances.” This was my dream job description in 1986.)
We thought we’d arrived when TiVo launched a few months’ shy of the year 2000. We made it to The Future, and it was everything we hoped for minus the jet cars! Sure, Y2K was looming and we were hoarding milk jugs of water and canned corn, but besides the end of the world, it seemed the absolute height of entertainment technology, and we were having it. Schedule recordings with a remote control, fast-forward through commercials, and never miss another minute of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire . . . yes, please! An entire generation of young mothers started putting their children to bed again with patience and nurture, no longer throwing kids into beds with four-word prayers because Friends started at 8:00 and it was 7:57. It was an imperfect system for my friend Molly, who kept an actual spreadsheet of her shows on all networks (carefully curated through TV Digest) and had to delete three programs a day to make room for new scheduled recordings, but she was up for this sort of aggressive TV watching and approached it with the dedication of an Olympian.
What more could there be? How could anyone improve on this system? You and I both know, my friends. Let’s say it together: Netflix. I don’t want to overstate it, but Netflix is my soul mate. Like Steely Dan said: I have found my home at last. Any show, any network, movies, UK programming, original series, all in a digital library that is surely a foreshadowing of heaven. Easily the best feature in the Netflix Rolodex of awesomeness:
Binge watching.
Episode after episode, all in glorious succession with no commercials and only a ten-second window in which to end the binge and get your life back together, which you loosely consider during seconds one through seven, but then the next episode automatically begins and it’s too late. What are we supposed to do? Turn it off at that point? We’re not Communists. The fates decided for us, and so, with forbearance, we move on to episode eleven of Gilmore Girls and log our fifth straight hour on the couch. After you auto-start the fourth episode, even Netflix itself throws shade with a pop-up screen: Do you want to continue watching? YES, I DO, NETFLIX. I don’t need your shame. Pretty judgy for an entertainment platform that offers 132 episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess. Don’t act like you’re concerned about our mental intake.