Somewhere in the early 2000s. The living room.
I’ve owned a lot of televisions over the years. Nearly all of them I got for free — people upgrading, getting rid of broken sets (relatively easily fixed), even a few I found sitting next to dumpsters that worked perfectly well. Yay, obtainium.
For a while I had a “Tower of Television” — idea courtesy of Mikemikemike — with a stack of them, all running and connected to cable. The idea is exactly what it sounds like: multiple televisions stacked vertically, all on at once.
At the time I put this together I thought it was an art statement about television. On reflection, it was mostly an inventory problem that I’d aestheticized. I had too many televisions and not enough shelves, so I put them in a column and called it a tower.
I disconnected cable over two years before writing this and I’m confident I haven’t missed it. I subscribe to Netflix and rent series on DVD — Deadwood, Carnivàle, Lost — which I imagine is significantly better without commercials. The tower is gone.
The 32-inch Sony I got from my brother-in-law still works fine, though it’s heavy as hell every time I need to move it. A bad transistor somewhere; a hundred dollars to fix and it’s been a great set. Free televisions are like that. You find the one bad thing, fix it, and the rest is fine.
This is also the philosophy of most old vehicles.