David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published April 29, 2003

Change the title to "The Baby Never Cries on TV"

I forget who sang it, but there was a 1980s pop song called "The Sun Always Shines on TV." Maybe it was A-ha. It could have been Depeche Mode. It doesn't matter. Those MTV-generated English boy bands always sounded the same to me.

Anyway, the song's basic message was, as I'm sure you could guess, that everything is peaches and cream in the magical world of television. It all works out in the end. There is no problem in life that can't be solved in 30 or 60 minutes. For the really BIG problems, there was the option of a two-part episode, but those are rare. The sun shines brightly on TV. Storm clouds, along with the ups and downs of reality, take a back seat to blindingly white teeth, perfect haircuts and situations that are too good to be true.

If I were to have a crack at rewriting the song, I might change the title to "The Babies Never Cry on TV." We all have our lenses through which we view the world, and my lenses are pink and blue. It happened without warning. My day-to-day existence is so consumed with my children that everything gets filtered through them. Call it an occupational hazard.

With rare exceptions, babies don't cry on TV. Sure, there may be the odd plot line or two in which a baby's crying is presented as a comedic dilemma -- a chance for bumbling fathers to show how inept they are at handling routine child care -- but for the most part the infants on television are remarkable well-behaved and virtually soundless. I call them stealth babies.

It's no secret why television producers and directors keep their newborn actors so quiet. It's obvious. Who wants to listen to a baby cry on TV? I don't. If I want to listen to a baby cry, believe me, I have plenty of opportunities throughout the day. Television is illusion. When people flop down on the couch with their pork rinds and Yoo-hoo, they want a escape from real life, even if it's only for a few moments. They want to visit a place where everyone is beautiful, the sun always shines, and the babies never cry.

We all get heaping doses of reality. Sometimes we get a little too much reality, and TV can be a great way to escape into a fantasy world. But like I said, it seems that even in the fantasy world the reality still finds a way to creep in. On those rare occasions when I can watch a little TV without the din of a crying child, I find myself mumbling to myself about how unrealistically quiet the TV kids are. Newborns are omnipresent in that way. Even when you get a break, they're still with you.

That's why I try not to watch too much TV, not that I have a lot of time to anyway. It can distort my sense of reality. A TV junkie might expect the sun to always shine, he might expect all women to look like Jennifer Aniston, and he might be expect the babies to be forever quiet. Keep dreaming. A dad who spends too much time in front of the tube might start to wonder why his kid is so noisy while those wonderful TV kids are so pleasantly docile. Real life is tougher than fiction. My kids cry. So do yours, or at least they did in their heyday.

Other people's kids cry, too -- real people, mind you, not TV people. In a way, it's comforting for parents to see other parents, children cry. It reassures us that there are other people in our situation. We parents want unique children, but we don't want the only one who cries. We don't want them THAT unique.

I don't know whatever happened to Depeche Mode or A-ha or whoever it was that recorded "The Sun Always Shines on TV." The band probably split up, the musicians probably got married, and they probably fathered a few kids. Maybe in the world of has-been pop stars, the sun shines more often than it does for us regular schmoes. I doubt it, but maybe, but I'll bet even their kids cried.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.