"The Imitation Of Life..."

What I Like About This: Well, this scene from Netflix's "ELITE" (4.03 "When Lies Dance with Temptations") came to mind yesterday as Husband and I were talking over dinner... We were watching an old tv show and the characters in it were extremely excited to be getting a color TV set.  Husband and I are both from the era when color tv had just become affordable and we both talked about when it was that color tv arrived in our childhood homes.  Then the conversation turned to cable television. Detroit was one of the last major cities to award a cable franchise. It wasn't until the mid 1980s that cable was widely available in the City of Detroit proper, although most of the surrounding suburbs had been wired for cable for at least a decade or more at the time.  Husband said his father discovered cable during a family trip out of state and on their return home, immediately signed up for service.  He said this was when he was in the 11th grade and he reminisced about how many of his school friends came to visit just to see the new wonder. This was all in sharp contrast to what happened in my childhood home.

My mother, while not terribly prudish, was nevertheless very protective of her children, and although my sister and I were the youngest, and still at home, we were late teens by the time cable became available in our neighborhood.  I remember my sister and I asking many times if we could get cable tv installed and my mother's answer was always the same... "From what I hear, there's nothing but sex, violence and garbage on cable tv, why would we pay for that?"  And so, we never had cable tv, the antenna and "edited-for-tv" films were the norm at our house.  When I left home, and moved into my own house, although I thought about it often, I never bothered with it either. And so, back to what I've posted above, every time I see a scene like this on a streaming channel (which is the new cable and to which I was an early-adopter), I fondly remember my mother's opinion and that as it turned out, she was mostly right.