Charles Synyard (@CharlesSynyard)

1/4 “Suddenly the lights in the auditorium dimmed, and the audience hushed. Over the loudspeakers came the DUM-DUM-DA-DUM of funeral music. Onstage the curtains opened ever so slowly, revealing a television set sitting on a pedestal with a funeral wreath on it. Its screen glowed white, but there was no picture. A single spotlight shone down on it… “When the group of boys and girls emerged from behind the curtain a moment later, they were carrying a small wooden coffin that was painted black, and they marched straight to the television set and stopped. Mr. Bell nodded to Katie, and she reached up and pulled the plug on the TV. The glowing screen went black. There was a moment of silence before Mr. Bell lifted the set into the coffin and closed the lid, laying the wreath on top.” (34, 36-37) Ashes to ashes? A great trial for Wacko’s students, is made lighter by a colorful, or rather black tie and surreal scene out of a dream! Finished reading The Great TV Turnoff, the April 1991 twenty-fourth book in the Fabulous Five series, by Betsy Haynes. The revolving spotlight returns to Katie Shannon, the red-headed feminist of the Fabulous Five girls’ clique at Wakeman Junior High. Now long an item with “macho” and opinionated onetime bad boy Tony Calcaterra, the entries where Katie’s the focus tend to be the most interesting, and The Great TV Turnoff does not disappoint. While perhaps the most dated book in the series yet, with TV’s central place largely usurped by mobile phone “doom scrolling” and streaming services, it’s rich with insights into the power the print media had until very recently, surprisingly predicts a few fixtures of Internet culture the author could hardly have foreseen, and is filled with moments of nostalgia. But for now, the premise. It’s baseball season, and Katie Shannon is having trouble pulling her boyfriend Tony Calcaterra away from the TV as he watches the games, and even her Fabulous Five friends are getting drawn in by soap operas and Star Trek reruns. She complains to her mom, a freelance writer—and Mom promptly launches a campaign to get Wakeman to do a TV turnoff like the one rival Branford Junior High just completed. By next Monday, the school administration is sold on the idea, and Katie, initially worried about how her friends would take it, gets involved when defending her mom’s good name against the bad-mouthing Laura McCall, leader of the rival Fantastic Foursome clique. While a voluntary two-week turnoff (to one-up Branford, which only gave up one week), students are heavily pressured to take part. You can see the contract they are asked to sign which, sorry boys, includes no video games (48). The administration cleverly manipulates the kids’ school spirit, riling them up with the theatrical after-school assembly described above, and presenting this as a competition with the other nearby junior high (54-57). This is what Andrew Bacha’s humorous cover illustrates; Katie, holding the plug, is the only familiar student; the other “pallbearers” are randomly taken from each grade. Students struggle to find other things to do—one of the funniest, a boy wrote out the Declaration of Independence on his younger brother’s tummy (69-70)! Katie comes up with a (mostly sugar and spice) list to help other kids pass the time, but Laura constantly tries to derail the whole initiative, even throwing a Saturday night “television party”, where there’ll be four TVs blaring away at once in her living room, with “tons of food and soda, plus video games” (79-81). Will Wacko’s kids get lured away? Attempts to reduce screen time, then as now, are salutary and tend to enrich life, but given the school’s typical, heavy-handed manner of astroturfing the anti-TV campaign, Laura McCall comes across almost as a free-spirited, anti-system heroine. Also not asked were some critical questions: on the one hand, how television addiction then, like phone addiction today, isn’t just a bad habit that came out of nowhere, but a specifically desired outcome meant to fill the wallets of a handful of corporations and oligarchs—and on the other, whether a newspaper leading the charge against over-reliance on visual media was itself a disinterested move. At any rate, even today The Great TV Turnoff is well worth the time away from your favorite device to peruse. The later Fabulous Five books were evidently much less read; this one has never even been uploaded to the Internet Archive, meaning fans will have to track down a copy and read it the old-fashioned way! #BetsyHaynes #TheGreatTVTurnoff #FabulousFive #television #TV #screentime #dated #astroturf #school #childrensliterature #childrensbooks #literature #books