When he turned 20, the question still lingered in his mind. “Why do I watch this?” five-year-old Altman would ask himself, but he could never seem to come up with an answer, so he continued to tune in day after day, week after week, month after month for 15 years. “The more I watched TV the more the world seemed like a worse place, and of course it’s a place I get beat up by bullies because that’s the way the world is,” Altman said.
The reporters on news programs never failed to have some terrible event to report on. The cops caught some bad guys, but there were always more. Bullies and bruises didn’t exist in the world that Altman escaped to - where every problem could be solved in 30 minutes with breaks for commercials.īut as time went on, the problems weren’t always solved at the end of the show. He spent time with his friends Dick Van Dyke, Bob Newhart and Oliver Wendell Douglas - stand-ins for the friends he couldn’t seem to make at school. Since he started school at five years old, he would come home every day to his family’s apartment, turn on the TV and sit for hours.
He gathered all of his TVs - even those that he had found on the street, lugged home and meticulously coaxed back into working condition - and got rid of them. But finally something clicked, and he was fed up. At 20 years old, Mitch Altman couldn’t remember life without television.
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