Savannah (Not Quite) Montana
I grew up without cable. It would come to define me.
I was a kid growing up without cable TV. I got a dose here and there, at the dentist’s office, hotels, and other people’s houses. My friend Kristina recorded Nickelodeon sitcoms onto VHS tapes for me, keeping me in the know. Sometimes I watched Disney Channel at my cousins’ house. In addition to cable, they had a pool, a trampoline, and easy access to candy, but they had to drink milk with dinner and weren’t allowed to sing at the table.
One New Year’s Eve, my cousins and I watched a PHIL OF THE FUTURE marathon. Pre-streaming, pre-algorithm, on air marathons were the only way to binge. On a family vacation, my cousins exposed me to HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL. Watching a cultural phenomenon months after everyone else is enlightening and alienating. You realize everyone was referencing it, but you actually weren’t all in this together, nor did you know how to get your head in the game. But now you do, and you can bop to the top with the best of them. And it could be… the start of something new.
I spent my early childhood watching PBS, then switched to WB and Fox dramas that were a little too old for me. And I liked it that way. To be clear, I wanted cable. I also wanted AIM, but I wasn’t allowed… with detrimental repercussions to my social status in junior high and possibly today. But eventually time passes, and then you’re an adult, and the number of channels you had as a child doesn’t matter at all.
Or it wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t gotten a job at Disney Channel after college. Apart from the child stars coming in for meetings and the nervous hopefuls coming in for auditions, at 21 I was the youngest person in the office. My coworkers had put HANNAH MONTANA and EVEN STEVENS on the air, and they asked me which Disney Channel shows I’d loved as a child. They wanted me to point at the bright posters on the walls and the life-size cardboard cutout of Miley, and say that was why I was in beautiful downtown Burbank starting the long path to becoming a TV writer.
I wanted to give that to them, but I had to admit I was a basic cable girl. I’d seen some of their hits, and I watched more to become a better employee. But I didn’t know how to act like someone who’d grown up with 200+ channels. I’d only had 25 and five were just static.
When we are fans, we let TV characters into our homes, week after week, season after season. We know them so well; they’re ours. It would’ve been inauthentic for me to claim Disney Channel as my own, even the programs I’d watched and enjoyed. It would’ve been like saying, “I love her so much! She’s my bestie!!” about some girl I’d met at my cousins’ house a few times. So I felt obligated to explain, time and again, my lack of cable.
One day, a coworker returned from an event I was sadly not invited to where a popstar-actress from the early aughts spoke. I came at him with superfan energy: “Did you see her? What was she like? What did she say?”
He examined me, then asked me where my fandom came from. He shouldn’t have been surprised: this popstar wasn’t on cable shows, she was in movies, tons of them, some of my favorites. She played iconic mean girls and iconic nice girls and she always sang on the soundtracks which I still have on CD to this day. (Not to brag, but my 2007 Prius has a six disc CD player… and a cage over my catalytic convertor.) I was fangirling, buzzing. He’d never seen me so starstruck-once-removed.
“You really love her,” my coworker said. “But… what about Hilary Duff?”
“Must we compare and contrast every female star?” I wondered, before realizing he just wanted to talk about a popstar-actress he actually knew personally. A crown jewel of the Channel. “Oh yes,” I said. “Hilary’s great! Very talented.”
“As Lizzie,” he said.
Lizzie McGuire was really my cousins’ friend, but we’d hung out a few times. Sometimes she was even syndicated onto basic cable on Saturday mornings, in my own house. “Yes,” I said, promising myself I’d binge the show after work, so he couldn’t catch me off guard with a season two reference.
He smiled sadly, pitying me. “But you didn’t have Disney Channel growing up, did you?” I could say I was a fan, but I could never love Lizzie like the kids with cable did. Turns out that’s not a thing you can make up for, as hard as you try.
No cable - the end of an era!
Love the perspective on this piece!