CABLE-TV: A Rare Thoughts Podcast

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Before Sitcom Dad, there was a sitcom couple. In 2009, a cable man in uniform walked up to a bank teller's line to pay his car note and told her he wanted to satisfy her. She ignored him smoothly. Gee tells the prequel: countless rejections, an aunt who put in a good word, the Martin and Gina years, and a kitchen proposal with no perfection at all.

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The first Sitcom Dad: Situational — a real incident from my own home.

Our family enjoys music.

Weeks of Michael Jackson in heavy rotation led to a Saturday of music videos — Scream, Skate, Leave the Door Open, Smokin Out the Window, 24K Magic — and a moment I didn't see coming. My oldest son looked at the screen and said, "This is weird."

In 1995, I was 10. My reaction was the opposite of my son's. It wasn't until I had a son that I realized I was over-exposed. Truth be told, it was always inappropriate.

Things are different for their generation. Your life is your motion picture. Your home is the set. And we're all watching.

Original score by OTM Recordings. Composed and produced by Gee Diamond. Created with AI

music generation tools; arrangement, mix, and sound design by hand.

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There's a TV on in almost every house I ever worked on, and it's not noise. It's the customer wanting me to inspect the issue in real time, and often, over my head, there's a sitcom family on the screen. In 1993, nine years old in my mom's room in Kerrybrooke, TGIF is where I met those fathers. This episode reads Robert Townsend, Damon Wayans, and Pops against the daily work the government actually counted, asks why a broadcast network could clear a whole block of fathers for a nine year old and the feed can't find one, and then answers the same questions at my own table. Every present father in every house I ever worked in is the main character of a show nobody is airing. This is what it would look like if somebody aired it.

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We were watched before we ever knew to call it that.

A meter used to sit in the living room, counting who was watching. A grid decided

when you showed up. Cable ran one direction — into the house, never back out.

The internet the same company sells you now runs both ways.

Home. Work. The commute. Entertainment. There's no room left in the house that

isn't wired — and somewhere along the way, we started opening the door for it

ourselves.

Nobody sends a vampire after your grocery list. They come for the music.

Behind the wire and through the wire. The frequency is rare-user.com.

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Perks of a Cable Guy!

I had two DVR boxes and every channel unlimited, for about thirty dollars a month a customer would've paid three hundred for. I learned the difference between having everything and having enough. Turns out I was scrolling before anybody called it that — we just called it channel surfing. I had every channel. And even that had an off switch.

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Before it was a job, it was the thing in the room. My grandma's house was the first TV I can remember — though not for anything that was ever playing on it. The box came in nineteen ninety-nine, and a technician put a remote in my hands — almost like he'd handed me the golden tool. Now I've got cable. Real cable.

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Family Matters raised me, but I want to zone in on Carl.

All those roles live in the average man — husband, father, son, uncle, neighbor, cop — all at once. A sitcom used to hand you the whole man; the feed hands you the version that performs best.

Behind the wire and through the wire.

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TV used to arrive in the living room and leave on a schedule. Now it lives in the hand and asks regular people to become the programming. We were cable-TV users; now we are internet users — and the internet uses us right back. Twenty-two years behind the wire, a wife, three boys, and a Carl Winslow impression that's still running the show.

Do you know what it's like to be watched? Not the feeling. The level. From a cable TV veteran who spent twenty years running the wire — a raw first transmission on how we stopped watching TV and became it.