Fruits I Shall Not Taste

I’m the last generation that will know what I’m about to talk about: growing up, there were times when you literally had nothing to do. By contrast, today there is never a period where you cannot do something—get on your phone, watch a screen, call somebody, text somebody, make a video, take photographs, build an app. What we have at our disposal now is endless.

What I’m talking about is way back in the ’80s, when I was a teenager. We had one television in our house, and we got NBC, ABC, CBS, and PBS. That was it. If nothing was on, you could either read a book, build something, or just go to sleep if it was nighttime. I may as well have been Amish. I never called people after a certain hour because I felt it was rude, and we only had landlines. Not even answering machines were prolific.

Eventually, we modernized and got cable. I even had a TV in my room for a few years—with a VCR! And an Atari. And a Commodore 64. And some cool toys. I was living large.

However, I went off to boarding school in my mid-teens and didn’t watch TV again until Beverly Hills 90210 and The Simpsons during my junior year in college. So I missed a lot of pop culture, to say the least. That was fine with me, because what I was doing instead of watching TV was a million percent better. And I still don’t watch TV shows, really. There have been some exceptions, like The X-Files, COPS, and The King of Queens. But I totally skipped The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and even Miami Vice. I’ve never seen a single episode.

Movies are a little different. When I was growing up, Hollywood didn’t churn out the volume of feature films they do now. You would know what was coming down the pipeline, and it would stay in theaters for long stretches. Now it’s like flipping through TV channels with the ease of production, comparatively. Technology is responsible for all of this.

I would know all the movie stars and all the movies, and it was something I was on top of. Then, as I got older, I just stopped caring. All the Hollywood stars seemed phony and like idiots, and the movies had lost their luster. Again, there were exceptions, like The Shawshank Redemption, which was on TBS 24/7 for a time. It’s a great movie. And I’d try to always go see my favorite actors like Gary Oldman or something funny like The Naked Gun. All funniness ended in 2008. And all good movies, if you think about it.

But I’m going to keep a list of shows and movies I totally skipped, for whatever reason. To some people it’s hilarious, and even to me it’s ironic. Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind less than a mile from the hospital where I was born in Atlanta, and I’ve never seen the movie nor read the book, which sits in a bookcase downstairs as I write this. A first edition, no less.

I tried to think of the most popular shows and movies during this time. There’s no way I could list all of them. But if it isn’t listed and it wasn’t bigger than any of these, then I never saw it either. Loosely, of course—we’re talking half a century. And some, I just mean, c’mon. Like Fast & the Furious? I’m not going to waste time sitting there watching that. And some I just haven’t ever been aware they existed, so I may be missing some that way too. Pop culture hasn’t interested me for a long time.

That was something I took for granted. I am an only child, so I was always bored. I had a lot of free time. Here in 2025, that is something that will never happen again. Ever. Those days of peaceful reflection in a quiet house are over.

Also, I want to state: technically, I have seen scenes from all of these, of course. Casablanca has been around forever and is a classic, so it’s all over the place. What I am talking about is sitting through an entire movie or watching even a single episode. The premise interests me, but not enough to spend the time consuming media like that anymore. I am capable of doing more.

THE LIST

…I’m sure I’ll think of more as time goes on. I’m always discovering cultural treasures that have somehow completely missed me. Some on purpose, like why I will never go to Las Vegas, and others escape my radar. And as I get older, the industry means less and less to me.