TVSquad

I think I'm going to coin a new term. I'm a movie grazer. I like watching TV and grazing in and out of movies that I've seen before, know well, and enjoy watching again in bits and pieces. I know this sounds crazy to some who have to watch a movie from the opening studio logo to the end credits (even as they're being smushed on commercial TV broadcasts).

I'm not like that, though. On Friday, amid the post-Thanksgiving haze and without much interest in the college football games or reruns of CBS soaps or syndicated fare, I was channel surfing. Every time I saw something I liked, I stopped for a while. It was mostly movies. I watch Cary Grant and Sophia Loren in Houseboat, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, there was a whole bunch of Goodfellas, because Bravo showed it back to back. So I watched the ending first, then stuck around to watch the beginning. What an incredible movie -- still!

I wasn't interested in jumping into the Beverly Hills 90210 marathon or the other programming on some networks, it was familiar movies that was doing it for me. I feasted on nibbles of motion pictures instead of indulging in a whole film.

I think I watched more than half of the original 1968 version of Yours, Mine and Ours, which was fun because Lucille Ball was 57 when she played the mother of 8 in that film. She married Henry Fonda and adopted his 10 children, then they had one more. She was 57 years old! No movie magic could make her look that much younger, but you know what? Here's the trailer for the movie, see if you can buy Lucy as a fertile Myrtle.



I still had some nostalgia about the film and had fun watching it nonetheless. Tim Matheson was a baby face in that movie, and the kid who played Phillip, Eric Shea, was the brother of Christopher Shea, who was the voice of Linus in the Peanuts TV specials. They had virtually the same voice!

It didn't matter because I know all these movies. I've seen them all. I have them all on DVD. Sometimes channel surfing a movie is just fun. It's like stumbling upon an old friend. In TV terms, it's the joy of reruns. Every Seinfeld or Friends or Andy Griffith or Star Trek is turf you and I have navigated before. They're still enjoyable, even knowing what the next line is.

So, there it is, welcome to my world -- I'm a movie grazer. What about you -- do you drift in and out of movies on TV like I do?