March is a Month That Can Drive You Mad
The month of March is almost here, so it’s time to talk about how living through the third month of the year is just like subscribing to Netflix.
Well, the month of March is almost here, so I guess it’s time to talk about how living through the third month of the year is just like subscribing to Netflix. Let me explain.
There’s a famous story in my family that, when I was very young, my parents expressed concern that I was watching too much TV. Apparently, I thought about it for a few moments and then said, “It’s just that … TV is my life!”
As usual, when it came to me, my parents were right to worry.
I’m old enough to remember when TV was something broadcast for free, from towers, through the air, and then into gigantic, ugly antennas stuck up on our roofs. Growing up in Bellmawr, I can’t even picture my childhood view of the sky without seeing a crisscross of hieroglyphic-shaped TV antennas growing from every house like sprouts on old potatoes.
But then, something magical happened: My parents got cable, and our channel count cartwheeled into double-digit territory.
Sometimes I’ll see videos of families reuniting after some catastrophe, sobbing as they hold each other in relief and joy that everyone is all right, and I’ll think to myself, that’s what it felt like when the cable guy showed up. Again, I can’t stress this enough: My parents were absolutely right to worry about me.
Originally, our cable box was like a little typewriter connected to the TV, and you pressed the button of which channel you wanted to watch. Then, we moved to Marlton and upgraded to Garden State Cable’s “Sprucer” box, which came with a remote control and pay-per-view, things that obviously meant we were living in the far future. Flying cars, food pellets and silver-foil unitards were only the next logical step.
Over the years, those things, sadly, didn’t show up, but TV continued to get better. We went from 40 channels to 100, then closer to 200. At one point, we had three C-SPANS. That’s right, if you wanted to watch boring men in ill-fitting suits talking about corn subsidies, you had three options to choose from.
Next came Tivo, which popped into existence like you rubbed a magic lamp and, after getting a trillion dollars and Lynda Carter from Wonder Woman as your girlfriend, you shrugged and told the genie, ‘Well, I guess being able to pause live TV, skip commercials and watch shows whenever I want would be nice, but that seems impossible.’ And, then, poof, somehow it was yours.
During the first 35 years of my life, TV continued to improve the same way my ability to shoot a basketball did not. So, when Netflix streaming appeared, it made sense that it would continue the tradition of pushing the asymptote ever closer to the infinite line of perfection.
And, for a while, that was true. TV was free from all constraints. A giant library of everything I could ever want to watch, just sitting in the clouds, delivered to my phone anywhere in the country? Shows dropping all the episodes at once, so you could do the equivalent of shame-eating an entire cheesecake and binge them? And all this for, like, $10 a month?
Like the humans in Wall-E, we immediately canceled our cable, strapped ourselves into floating milk-shake chairs, and began to watch Dark Mirror without being aware of the irony that we were living it, too.
But, as Robert Frost once wrote: Nothing gold can stay. Slowly, the prices started to creep up. Netflix made break-ups even harder because you couldn’t keep using your boyfriend’s password, as nature intended. The Stranger Things finale happened.
On top of all that, the other networks stopped giving their shows to Netflix, and started their own streaming services, requiring, and I say this without hyperbole, 20,000 different accounts and a salaried personal assistant just to keep track of which shows are on which service.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the month of March. Just like Netflix and the rest of the streaming services, March is an illusion of improvement. It claims to be the month that spring starts in, but it’s really just more winter, wind and something called “the Ides.”
March, like TV streaming, is a broken promise.
That can be disheartening, but I try to remember that April is still coming and that the sun can’t stay hidden forever. I hope the same thing is true for our fractured, overpriced, confusing and punch-the-wall-levels-of-frustrating TV situation.
If Netflix is like March, then I hope whatever comes next is, like, Memorial Day Weekend at the Shore. I think as we all try to struggle through a year that feels like the biggest false promise of all, it’s the least the universe can do for us.
Because, TV is my life, and my parents probably weren’t worried enough about me.
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Published and copyrighted in South Jersey Magazine, Volume 22, Issue 11 (February 2026)
Published and copyrighted in South Jersey Magazine, Volume 22, Issue 11 (February 2026)
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