I don’t tend to watch TV much these days, but I am absolutely in love with the AppleTV show Ted Lasso. While watching it, I feel like it was written for me (I’m the perfect demographic). It’s about kindness and problem-solving, and friendships and relationships and different types of love. It’s character-driven. The characters grow and reflect and change, with support. They work through flaws and difficult transitions and emotional moments. Nobody gets murdered or raped or perpetrates or is victim to hate crimes. The show is witty and fast-paced in its play-on-words humor and cultural allusions. And there is compassion in the writing. 

I find when I watch TV or movies these days, I often am on edge, expecting the worst, some unexpected bloody or inhumane plot twist blatantly thrown at me. So many shows do that these days, portraying human beings at their worst. I remember going to the AMC movie theatre pre-Covid and noticing that every single movie of the 16 showing except two were horror films. The remaining two were animated family films. 

And while visual media has taken tension up a notch or ten, scenes getting faster and often more graphic, my tolerance for some tension and watching plots of inhumanity has steadily decreased. 

Part of this intolerance happened with motherhood. I was already having waking nightmares all the time, imagining the worst possible things happening to my small, innocent children. I didn’t want to see them on screen too! Talk about heightened anxiety! 

But I’ve always been sensitive to this stuff. My imagination is such that if I see some horrible scene of someone being victimized or a scary, sociopathic villain acting enacting cruelties, that scene will stay in my brain, like an iPhoto moving snapshot, and I will see it over and over and over for weeks, months or years. When I saw Jaws at age eleven, I was scared every time I went swimming for years afterwards, even in swimming pools. Even though it was illogical, the swimming triggered that film footage in my imagination and the emotional response of seeing it. 

Some months ago, I was trying to create a list of movies I’d like to see. My husband loves to watch movies and will watch ANYTHING (I encourage him to go see all the horror films he wants—without me!), and he missed watching movies with me since I’m picky about what I subject myself to. I Googled love stories and feel goods, and in doing so, ran across several websites with recommendations of movies for empaths. I liked almost all the movies recommended on those sites. Though I don’t go in for labels, I am highly empathetic. It’s one of my superpowers. And at times in the past, it seemed like my kryptonite too. That was because I hadn’t accepted and embraced that aspect of my character. 

In general, I don’t watch a lot of TV because I watched a whole lot in my youth, alone mostly. I watched old movies on Sunday mornings: Shirley Temple and Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, Laurel and Hardy, movies like Casablanca. I watched WAY too much TV and feel, looking back, that I wasted so much time. 

I have to stop this essay abruptly, before reaching conclusions—maybe I’ll add them later. It’s VERY late and I can’t keep my eyes open. But I HAVE to post! So there you go. 

I choose kindness, wit and compassion. I choose Ted Lasso! Season three, please!