The Big Turnoff

Like most parents, Ellen Currey-Wilson and her husband aspire to do a better job of child-rearing than their own parents. Currey-Wilson spent far too much of her childhood watching The Beverly Hillbillies and Hawaii Five-O; maintained intimate long-term relationships with Mary, Rhoda, and Phyllis; and kept up with the fictional history of every character on Friends. But now she longs for her son, Casey, to know the people around him better than he knows the Teletubbies.
So naturally, like most parents, she goes a bit overboard. Banning the boob tube from her family's daily existence, Currey-Wilson vows that her son (and her accommodating husband, by extension) won't be exposed to even a split second of screen time and pledges to wean herself from her own television addiction.
In this revealing and very funny take on parenting in a media-crazed world, Currey-Wilson recounts her increasingly outlandish behavior: becoming a human shield as she throws herself in front of the TV set at her son's playmates' house, experiencing fits of insecurity as she worries whether Casey will be ostracized for not knowing the theme song to SpongeBob SquarePants. And her own habit? She sets timetables for unplugging herself but often falls off the wagon, racing up to the storage room, where she's hidden the TV, to get a fix of Three's Company reruns while Casey naps. But something remarkable happens to her family as television finally assumes a backseat to real life: their relationships begin to deepen and grow.
In an age when it's easier to flip on the TV than to truly interact with the people around us, The Big Turnoff shows what can happen when one woman decides to buck the trend.