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What are the signs of addiction? According to Wilkins, there are some key clues. Do the children come straight home from school and turn on the TV? Do they watch more than ten hours a week? Is their concentration span divided into seven-minute segments, the usual time between commercials? Do they require instant gratification? Do they feel a closer kinship to Oscar the Grouch than to their own cantankerous Uncle Oscar? Are they video zombies, listless and lethargic while viewing, revved up like the roadsters on The Dukes of Hazzard when they are not? As for parents, many of the same symptoms apply. Adults, however, are far more apt than children to deceive themselves about their own TV compulsion. Like alcoholics, says Wilkins, adults hooked on TV tend to underestimate their dependency. Wilkins' method of kicking the habit is like the old-fashioned way of losing weight: eating less. The first step, as with overcoming any addiction, is mustering the will to do so. During the first week of her four-week program, she advises keeping a detailed daily schedule of all viewing. Says she: "Everyone is astonished by the total number of hours." The second week: Decide precisely which programs to watch and why you plan to watch them. Be critical, she says, and rate the programs afterward. Week 3: Cut back. Keep only one set active (most middle-class homes, she avers, contain at least three sets). Select one hour of viewing a night, watch as a family, and collectively evaluate the shows. Week 4: Turn it off.
Earlier this year, Wilkins conducted a week-long cold-turkey cure with elementary-school pupils in Ridgewood, NJ. Her accounts of the week of abstinence often sound like the minimelodramas at a fat farm. Some families balked; some began and gave up; several starving mothers furtively watched General Hospital; one frustrated father resorted to taping Rangers' hockey games. In general, parents seemed to suffer the pangs of withdrawal more acutely than their children.
At times, Wilkins sounds like a Pollyannaish sitcom mom, regaling readers with the pleasures of life without TV. It might just be that many TV-liberated adults would fail to make profitable use of their new free hours and indeed find life unendurably dull without their daily electronic fix. Released from the video cocoon, children will not necessarily emerge as articulate and considerate, scoring perfect 800s on their SATs. In fact, television in small doses may enhance learning and understanding. A study conducted by the California state department of education revealed that although students who watched The Dukes of Hazzard scored less well than those who did not, students who watched M-A -S -H per formed better than those who did not.
Although Breaking the TV Habit explores no new ground in its indictment of TV, it does provide a fresh, perhaps even workable scheme for curing TV addiction. Wilkins presents a distressing vision of Television Land as an endless series of television sets, holding an infinite series of smaller sets, endlessly mirroring them selves. It was TV Critic Michael Arlen who said that television connects viewers to nothing except the assumption of being connected to something. Wilkins' advice:
To reconnect yourself to the world, disconnect the set.
— By Richard Stengel.
Reported by Russell Leavitt/Los Angeles