Can I see Dr. Benton punch the air one last time?

Besides The Daily Show, there are three shows I watch on a regular basis, all because I am married to Kate. The shows are House, Grey’s Anatomy and ER. When I started dating Kate she was already an ER devotee. She’s been watching House from the beginning and was slowest to warm to Grey’s Anatomy. There are brilliant aspects of each one of these dramas. The characters and ongoing plot twists can make for an addicting show. However, I could stop watching altogether tomorrow and be okay with that. I don’t think Kate could.

Kate is a professional in the field of medicine. The interest she takes in these shows is not comparable to mine. I watch them more for Kate than for any other reason. Stories told in the shows and the hours spent watching them constitute a fairly large gap of time every week. I might be doing something different with that time if I was single, not necessarily because I am married to Kate, but because I love her. And, in a way, (this may sound weird) when I married Kate, I married her favorite TV shows. I married her interests. No matter how inconsequential a TV show may be, it is valuable to me because it is time I can spend with Kate.

After all that time watching TV shows, because someone else is invested in them, one becomes hooked as well on all the peculiarities of character and intricacies of plot. So, it was a little bittersweet last night when ER signed off for the last time. Kate and I have been watching this show for as long as we have been together (the last six seasons) and before that, ER was the preferred television show of Thursday nights at my childhood home, going back to when I was 11 years old. That’s a long, damn time. I’m not trying to gauge what kind of role a TV series has played in my life. The answer would probably be vague and the task a bit shallow, but I know it has played some role and because of that it was a little sad to hear the ER theme music one last time last night.