Matthew
We forget most of the time that when we watch TV especially the news No one is looking directly at us. No one is making direct eye contact. That is nothing more than an illusion. A parlor trick of electrical intimacy. All the newscasters see are bright white lights the kind that interrogators use to wear people down and a blinking red camera light which navigates them towards the general direction of wherever the beam of light falls on you. To them, you are nothing more nothing less than the teeming masses yearning to be free to watch. The people who populate sitcoms are like the ghosts in evening clothes who cut 78s in the 1920s when jazz flew like martini-soaked doves from the basement of Smokey Club Nowhere that somehow managed to touch your heart 90 years later. Sitcom characters are the product of pure invention with a drizzle of whimsy who are no more real than that man or woman who turned and smiled at you at the traffic light right before they drove off into the way