IS IT HARD FOR PEOPLE WITH AS TO WATCH TV?

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I have a very hard time following any TV or movie plot. I get completely sidetracked and obsessed by any problem with the props, or if someone uses poor grammar. Anything like that will divert my attention from the content of the program and I will fall off track. If I'm watching a TV show that's supposed to take place in 1957, and they have a car or a TV set from the 1960s, I have to get up and leave.

Charles

I use the TV for background noise...I used to watch TV constantaly as a kid but then I was under a LOT of emotional stress and used it as away to decompress and escape reality but perhaps it was because there were better programs in the 90's.

Holy crap, NO!

Not for me! TV is practically my life's blood sometimes! Though I am very particular about what I watch. It may not seem so to an onlooker, because I'm a channel hopper, and watch a lot of different things, but they all seem so fall into the same types of categories.

I do a lot of work on the computer during the day, and often can't concentrate on IT if the TV isn't on.

Once my kids come home though, I can't concentrate on anything, or at least find it very difficult, because they are so noisy I can't hear the TV!! !

I perfer two certian movies....Lion King and Titan A.E.. I think I could watch them over and over forever.

My biggest problem with TV is when it's on and my spouse wants to talk to me at the same time. That's impossible for me. The TV sound and picture simply commands my attention and there is no way I can tune it out and focus on her. It used to irritate her, but she understands now. She watches more TV that I do. She's NT and she grew up in a family that had it on in the background all the time. She knows now to turn it off or at the very least mute it while we talk.

I grew up having TV metered out in small doses and craved every minute I was able to watch because I was mesmerized by it. That was back in the days of black and white and only four channels.

I ask her a lot of questions about characters when we watch TV together:

"Why was she mad at him?"
"Why didn't he just eat dinner first and then go out?"

Or, I'll ask her questions days or even weeks later about a show we watched because it's taken me that long to get around to thinking about the show in greater detail.

She will often say: "It's just a TV show!"

We have a commonality in that both of us think Seinfeld is one of the best TV shows ever produced. We quote the show even now, almost daily. It's so easy to segue regular conversation into a Seinfeld quote for us.

Just a heads up because someone is bound to say something even though I don't really care but this is an ancient thread and considered "necro" so someone will probably dislike the fact that you resurrected it. But like I said, I don't care. Some topics are timeless and this is one of them so why start a whole new thing when there could be some gems of wisdom in one that's already been around for a few years? That said, I can't help but respond to your reply and you shall soon see why.

From your description you must be just about the same age as I am except we only got two channels at first then later a few others that didn't come in very well because some stations boosted their power. I didn't have a TV at all in the house until I was about 10 (1970), and didn't have anything color or bigger than 13 inches until I moved out of the house and bought my own. So the "small doses" I got were when I was at someone else's house for short visits or when I spent summers at my cousin's in Massachusetts for a few weeks during summers for a few years.

Oddly, despite the similarities in our upbringing I am the exact opposite of you. I never wonder why characters do what they do because back in the eighties I hung with a bunch of younger NT kids (young adults really) from whom I learned a little tidbit of wisdom that has multiplied my enjoyment of TV watching immensely every since I heard it.

"It's in the script!"

It's true! Characters do what they do because that's the way it's written. It's that simple! It doesn't have to make sense. It's the writers vision and no writer can take every watcher's questions into account while writing, so just relax and accept that and you'll find you'll stop driving your significant other crazy.

My ability to converse while watching comes from HOW I watch TV. Most of what I watch are the same shows, over and over. I've seen the entire first 14 years of NCIS between six and ten times. Frazier probably over twenty times now. There are many others too. If I miss something it's no big deal because I'll see it again another time.

I tend to string the story lines together in my head over several viewings of the same episodes because I, like you, store what I did catch in my head. Only instead of talking about them days later, I actually watch them again weeks to months later. TV is basically incidental to my life. It's just there all the time.

Funny thing is, it's my current wife that drives me bonkers with the questions. She's like a little kid in the theater asking, "Why'd he do that?" Or "Are they gonna...?"

I have to keep yelling at her, "WATCH THE SHOW AND MAYBE YOU'LL FIND OUT!! !!"

There are a few exceptions. Shows that we both consider so good we stop everything we are doing and JUST WATCH. Longmire was one of them when it was still playing.

By the way, I watched NCIS not for the mysteries or crime solving but for the back stories so that has a lot to do with why I could watch the way I did.

I don't find it hard to watch TV since I've found shows that I like a couple of years ago.

I can enjoy watching some types of TV, but depending on the type of show, I often find it's difficult for me to follow a plot. Worst case seams to be mystery type shows where people are talking in strong accents.

Subtitles help.

I’m slow at watching tv, if I’m in bad mood or little bad mood, I need to turn off the tv & turn on my music.

well I certainly like streaming better, that way you don't have to deal with all the annoying commercials. I do like to watch things but commercials piss me off so for me streaming with things like netflix, hulu and amazon prime is the way I always wanted to watch t.v and movies. You can pick the thing you want to watch and just watch it right now...without commercial breaks plus seems cheaper than paying for a cable or satallite package. I mean its aleady 60 a month to keep the internet running...it would be more if we had a t.v package on top of it. But I use my moms netflix account, and my boyfriend has his parents hulu....and then we pay for amazon prime so gets us all the t.v and movies we want pretty much.

Also I really like to have subtitles...it certainly helps if the dialogue gets hard to hear. I remember as a kid I always got annoyed by people talking or making noise so I didn't hear what the characters said or sometimes just when movie volume fluctuates.....so yeah I like the sub-titles so I am sure what was said. Granted sometimes the subtitles are a bit off.

I did watch a Scandinavian movie, where these guys saved some baby that was supposed to be a king or something, and they had to protect him to get him where he needed to be...to his throne or whatever. But there was no subtitle option for the movie and the language was Norwegian I think so yeah I did not understand any of the dialogue...but still was a good movie and had one of the actors from game of thrones, the wildling guy with the red beard.

I can watch TV but my main issue is the fact that I can't sit still for extended periods of time without some form of stimulation which is where my stim toy comes into play.

One of my really close Autistic friends cannot watch tv. For him it's the sensory overload and he cannot not get completely involved in the story and that overwhelms him.

If I am not overwhelmed I can watch tv and have no problem with it as long as the sounds are sounds I can handle. Like if there is music playing with bass or rap, I can't watch the show. If I am overwhelmed it's too much sensory stimulation for me.

I don't like to watch t.v specifically because of commercials...like in the early 90's it was not as bad like there would be a few commercials but whatever. But it got to the point where saturday night live an hour long show would get spread to 2 hours because of all the commercials, watch a movie and they even cut parts out to make room for commercials. So yeah I stopped watching T.V and started sticking to buying movies/shows on dvd. But now with the streaming services it makes it a bit easier. You can just watch the show/movie without so many adds, I mean I get enough of those on the internet I don't need it when I am trying to watch something.

Pretty sure that SNL has always been and still is an 90 minute show including commercials. Started at 11:30 pm and ended at 1:00 am. There were some "best of" episodes that may have been shorter but 90 minutes was, as far as I know, always the show's standard format. If you've seen 2 hour versions, I suspect those may be reruns in their entirety jammed with more ads.

Many movies have been cut short for ads since the beginning of putting theater movies on TV after having made their theater runs. Most 90 minute movies were shown originally with minimal or even no shortening in two hour time blocks on TV to allow room for ads. Longer ones were usually edited (cut) to make room for ads. Some ran for over two hours with ads.

Shortening TV shows in reruns has been going on since at least as far back as the 1960's. I think you might be under the impression this is something new (perhaps) because your own favorite shows debuted in the 1990's, and only since then have you noticed the practice. (?)

When there's nothing worth watching on TV then yes it is hard to "watch TV" as someone on the spectrum.

When I was younger I had a really bad time watching TV when other people were around or also watching. I would get very embarrassed and uncomfortable to be seen watching cartoons, so I'd turn the volume down until it was barely audible because I worried my parents or brother would hear. People are bewildered when I get upset and angry because they won't stop talking over the show, or copying the dialogue over and over and OVER, or, in my brother's case, criticizing every little thing about what I was watching and telling me how it was destroying my brain. My parents should have gotten me a lock for my bedroom door the second we moved into our new house.