Back in the day – before we paid $7 for a cup of coffee, had cameras on our cars and bought gourmet food for dogs – the family television was a big deal. It was in the living room and was the center of the familial universe.
In my day, we had a 21-inch screen, although there was always a friend whose family invested heavily in TVs and had a 25-inch screen. In that world, the biggest sign of success was a family with two TVs. And that second TV was almost always in the parents' room, where they could watch the late local news and "The Tonight Show" before they fell asleep to prepare for another day of presumably smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee from Stryofoam cups.
When my dad married my stepmom, we suddenly had two TVs! One in the family room and the other in the living room, which was largely off-limits to children (because we might leave footprints in the carpet, I think). The "living room TV" was one of the big console sets that took about 90 seconds to show a picture after you turned it on, so I almost always chose the 21-inch RCA in our family room, where I could watch while sitting in my beanbag chair and tossing a nerf ball at my sisters.
Fast forward to 2026. We all have smartphones that can show us a nearly infinite amount of video. Yet we still have TVs. More TVs than we had 50 years ago. Way more.
According to a recent survey, a quarter of American households have two TVs. Impressive? Well another 39% have three or more. That means that nearly two-thirds of households have at least two TVs.
That's impressive, although it's hard to know why. Why would you have five or more TVs (Which describes 9% of households)? There can't be that many people who want to watch Johnny Carson's monologue before they go to sleep, can there?
When I was a kid, two luxuries were shorthand for someone being unreasonably rich – wealthier than anyone I could know, the kind of wealth only held by people like Howard Hughes, the members of the Beatles or E.F. Hutton. Those people had telephones in unusual places like their car or their bathroom and/or they had TVs in their bathroom or kitchen.
If a TV show character watched a kitchen TV or took a call in their car, they were uber-rich.
Now, we have phones in every room, as long as we take our smartphone around the house. And many of us have big TVs in the living room, each bedroom and the kitchen, so we can watch . . . Cable news? Sports? YouTube videos of old TV shows we used to watch when we had one TV?
You could make the case that TV sets, which have dramatically changed over the years, are the cockroaches of entertainment devices. They're survivors. The humble TV set (or not-so-humble 98-inch screen with anti-reflexive coating, theater sound and high-end picture quality) has made it through the cable TV explosion, the satellite dish era, the cord-cutting era, the streaming era and the "Bluey" era. From variety shows in the 1950s and 1960s to today's video shorts, people still use television sets to augment their smartphones.
Will we continue to add more TVs to our homes? Will we start putting two TVs in the living room, one in the backyard, one in the garage, one in each bathroom and one on the inside of each cabinet in the kitchen?
It seems unlikely, but had you asked me what percentage of Americans had at least five TVs in their house, I would never have guessed 9%.
If you'd told 9-year-old me that during my lifetime nearly 40% of households would have three or more TVs, my jaw would have dropped as I waited for the TV to warm up so I could see if "Sanford and Son" would be a re-run (which I'd watch anyway. We only had three stations and one of them was a PBS station).
Given the choice between living in the era of three TV networks and one family TV and now, I would . . . heck, I'd choose now 1,000 times out of 1,000. Even though Mrs. Brad and I are in the 25% of the population with one TV, we each can watch whatever we want on our phones, including a "Sanford and Son" rerun.
That Fred was crazy!
Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.
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