“Television was my primary relationship when I was a child. It was my third parent, but it was the only parent that meant anything to me, or that had anything to teach me,” Bruce Eric Kaplan said, about his inspiration for this week’s cover. Kaplan, who is a prolific cartoonist and a writer for television shows such as “Girls,” “Six Feet Under,” and “Seinfeld,” was greatly influenced by what he described as the “huge, enormous box in the living room.” “I loved television so much that I wanted to crawl into the TV and live there, which I ended up doing by becoming a television writer,” he said. “I’d rather be in a fictional living room than in a real one. I still feel that way when I’m drawing a cartoon. I’d rather be inside my cartoon, in a world that I can control, that looks right to me, than out there in real life.” Of course, the experience of watching television as a child that Kaplan recalls is now largely a remnant of the past. “Television has now gone beyond television,” Kaplan said, meaning that the medium has expanded beyond the traditional family gathering in a living room now that we are able to stream shows on any device with a screen. “It’s a much different world,” he lamented. “Everyone’s watching their own thing, at their own time, on their own little thing.”
Here is a gallery of New Yorker covers that feature television watchers through the decades:
