Charles Synyard (@CharlesSynyard)

3/4 “‘What I’m worried about is homework,’ said Dekeisha. ‘I always do homework in front of the television. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe I just like the background noise.’” (37-38) Leave it to the most dated serial in the series, to be the most prescient! As you can guess from the title, in The Great TV Turnoff, released April 1991, Wakeman Junior High takes on excessive attachment to television. Thirty-five years later, “screen time” is mostly mobile devices and gaming desktops. Yet author Betsy Haynes managed to foresee many trends that would become fixtures of life and culture in the Internet era. While Dekeisha becomes reliant on electronic noise, Melanie begins writing fanfiction, and Tony gets engrossed in sports stats. Dekeisha Adams is the tall, pretty token black girl at Wakeman, and as Wacko’s two-week TV Turnoff looms, she chips in her concern to her friends. Unlike others who see TV as entertainment, she’s come to rely on it as a study aid. The noise helps her productivity! The girls move on without comment, but in hindsight, it deserves some. Radio preceded televison, it was already portable when TV was still a big heavy box that had to sit on a table, and of course many enjoyed having the radio on while doing mental work. But the sound on television is more disembodied: it will be hard to follow what’s going on without looking at the screen, which is perhaps the point. The chatter and background music on TV are less likely to distract a focused brain, and some find they help them focus. Nowadays… wow, some people have truly become addicted to sound, sound, sound, all the time. A few days ago I was chatting with a girl who had an earbud in, and was listening to music right them, and said she virtually always was. I remarked that she’d gotten quite addicted to it, and she admitted it was a problem. The device tracks how long it’s on, and she says some days, it’s virtually 24 hours. But more specifically, what Haynes showed an early instance of, is people addicted to TV series audio, even when they can’t watch the visuals. An older woman I know is among these, always replaying some Breaking Bad-looking, high production live-action show, unable even to fall asleep at night without it streaming. Others do the same with One Piece or other anime. Never alone with the sound of the wind, the grasshoppers the gentle hum of machines, and your own thoughts. Is that how humans are supposed to live? Fabulous Five member Melanie Edwards, meanwhile, is pained at having to miss Interns and Lovers for two weeks. This is the “daytime drama” Taffy Sinclair briefly appeared in in Taffy Sinclair, Queen of the Soaps, the third book in the first series; Cam, the main male character here, wasn’t mentioned then, so the cast has shifted. Interns and Lovers is of course supposed to be like General Hospital, which I’ve never watched (as a Ramona series fan, I think to Cleary’s parody, Big Hospital). During the turnoff, students who sign up to participate, as they are heavily encouraged to, are expected to write down what they do instead of watch TV, their struggles, and any times they cheated—which gets Melanie’s brain working. “Melanie beamed back at Katie. ‘The part in the contract about keeping a diary just gave me a great idea. Every afternoon when I get home from school I’m going to write down what I think is happening on Interns and Lovers that day. That way, I won’t miss the program as much, and I can compare what I thought would happen with what really did happen after the turnoff is over.’” (51) Melanie, pre-World Wide Web, is writing fanfic about a popular franchise! She can’t share it globally, but she does tell the rest of the Fabulous Five what’s going on (85, 92). Sylvia recuperates, and Cal’s falling for her… or so she thinks! When the turnoff finally ends, Sylvia is still in intensive care. Only today did her eyelids finally flutter (113)! In a pre-AI world, this was a way to milk the screenwriters for all they were worth. If the gals could poke fun at us guys for the famously drawn-out Frieza saga, right back atcha on their soaps. Drawn-out, never-ending series are a feature of capitalism, and the Fabulous Five books themselves are a prime example, that released a book a month for years, not to mention the even more successful Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High, that dwarfed even this present series. Should be observed that, to her credit, Betsy Haynes doesn’t do the frustrating Will they/Won’t they?: of the key couples in the Fabulous Five, Jana and Randy, and Beth and Keith carried over from the Taffy Sinclair books, while Katie and Tony were officially an item early on, and Melanie was clearly zoning in on Shane for some time before they finally started going steady (Christie, also earlier on, proved less interested in romance, unfortunately for Jon). They are strong relationships, and can be relied on whatever else is in flux. Lastly, Katie Shannon’s aforementioned boyfriend, Tony Calcaterra, deprived of baseball on TV, gets to enjoy reading the coverage in the paper (the Bridgeport Post that enopcouraged the turnoff; self-interested campaign?) That may seem a more old-fashioned way to take in the game, but what does he start poring over? The statistics! “Actually, since the turnoff, I’ve been reading about the games in the newspaper. Some of the write-ups are pretty good, and I haven’t missed watching them on TV as much as I thought I would. And I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been reading all the stats, too, so now I’m really an expert on baseball.” (108) Which came first, which is more real? These guys throwing balls and whacking them with wooden bats, running across the grass to catch these balls, and sliding in the dirt to avoid getting tagged out as they reach the next base—or a bunch of numbers that make the great game into a bunch of abstractions? Sports stats have become so much more an obsession now that they can be readily searched and found out for the most obscure things. Someone I knew mentioned a friend of his, who every five minutes, seemingly all day every day (during the sports season?), would pull out his phone, and check updated stats of some sort. Abandon all hope, ye whi enter here! And it must have seemed so innocent, when Tony examined them in the local paper, because he couldn’t watch the game on television during the turnoff… Will be posting parts 1/4 and 2/4 a little later. #BetsyHaynes #TheGreatTVTurnoff #FabulousFive #television #TV #backgroundnoise #noise #fanfiction #fanfic #sportsstats #statistics #stats #baseball #sportsball #abstraction #prescient #predictions #predicted #childrensliterature #childrensbooks #literature #books