Televison from Other Worlds
I recently ditched cable television for satellite for various reasons unimportant here, but during the transition, for a brief period, I had both. Being by nature experimental and curious I decided to fiddle around with the two systems, and hooked my satellite up to the cable box, then fed the results directly into my television. At first nothing happened, so I switched around channels, played with the settings of the television, and finally reinstalled my old UHF antennae. I was rewarded with a news station, CN3.
I had seen CNN before, and MSNBC, and even the (ugh) Fox News, but CN3 was new to me, even as it felt vaguely familiar. The news was ordinary enough, but I didn’t recognize the newscasters or the various public figures being mentioned. Suddenly, with a rush of familiarity, I saw the President of the United States, a black man, President Palmer.
At first I became convinced that I had tapped into some weird reality show based on Keiffer Sutherland’s 24. On that show Keiffer plays Jack Bauer, a counter-terrorism agent who worked for a black president named David Palmer. The president I saw on my irregularly configured television wasn’t that President Palmer, but his brother, Wayne Palmer, who, as far as I know, isn’t the President in current 24 continuity, so I think my glimpse into what I can only assume to be an alternate reality, is in someway ahead of the television shows we’re watching here.
I left the CN3 on for quite a while, afraid to mess with the delicate tunings that allowed me this glimpse into another reality, but eventually, bored with the simple news and opinion programs of an Earth that wasn’t my own, I tentatively switched channels, knowing that I may never again stumble onto such a thing again. Instead, I hit pay dirt.
It was Friday night, just before midnight, and I had tuned into NBS, and the show I was watching was Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Not the drama from NBC about a fictional Saturday Night Live-like television show starring Matthew Perry, but the actual late night sketch comedy show starring Tom Jeter, Harriet Hayes and Simon Stiles. My favorite sketch was “Peripheral Vision Man.”
What followed after that was a marathon 48-hour session of channel surfing through alternate realities. I caught sight of things both extraordinary and mundane: UBS, yet another network, with its litany of odd yet similar news and cop shows; an entire network devoted to animated pornography, done in The Simpsons style called The Top Hat Channel; The Omnicom Corporation’s show Truman II, detailing the life of a man who didn’t know he was the star of a television show; Network 23, which seemed to be broadcasting news and entertainment from a dystopian version of our own world and hosted by Max Headroom; a scary show in which men were hunted for sport on a network called ICS.
On WHHZ, channel 9, I caught an all muppet television channel, all the news, all the shows, all the commercials were performed by muppets. There are few things more disturbing than muppet on muppet crime.
Kid reporter Billy Batson reported the news of a supercrime being perpetrated by Dr. Sivana in Fawcet City on KWHZ. And on Cable 54 I was temporarily hypnotized into believing that the alien creatures who live among us are actually human.
IBC, two of them, both running yet more horrible network shows. Global News Network, covering the events of the Christian Rapture that occurred on their world, while over on KGEB they were covering yet another Martian Invasion of that world. BBC 12 was covering the artifact found on the moon and the recent voyage to Jupiter by astronaut David Bowman.
In short, I was allowed a glimpse of what television would be like on other worlds. It should have been an amazing and eye-opening experience, but it was similar to the first time I found myself in England watching British television. Over here, my exposure to British television had always been the best stuff, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Doctor Who and Fawlty Towers. Over there, I learned that British television, like are own, is 99% crap, and the reason we saw the best stuff in the United States was because it was the best stuff.
My view of television from other worlds was filled with shows both extraordinary and mundane, but in the end, it was still just television, and when the cable company finally cut off the signal and the unique arrangement of satellite, UHF and cable that allowed me a glimpse into these other worlds ended, I had still wasted two days of my life watching television.
