On the other side of your picture tube is a surprisingly two-dimensional world that is smaller, shabbier and more phony than it appears ''As Seen on TV.''
Solid-looking desks turn out to be unpainted plywood covered in stapled carpeting. ''Sets'' that look like classy offices are forlorn sticks of furniture crowded into a pool of glaring light. Glamorous TV Land is like a cereal-box toy - disappointingly shrunken and flimsy.
Men and women inhale hairspray fumes, dab their faces with makeup, then switch on 500 watts of charm, talking, laughing, grieving and smiling directly into a cold glass eye.
Anyone caught being so intimate with a parking meter would wind up in the nervous hospital. But when someone slobbers all over a camera, we watch for hours, bathed in the flickering blue light of spreading darkness.
The most popular guest in our homes is an oily huckster who looks like someone on Melrose Place and cons us into buying useless artifacts from a world that doesn't exist; a Pied Piper who steals the best years of childhood imagination; a playground punk who poisons innocence with harsh lessons in profanity, cruelty, sex and crudity.
If that view of TV sounds more depressing than a Ken Burns series on slavery, consider this anti-TV Guide, compiled with help from The American Enterprise magazine's Sept.-Oct. cover story on television: ''Friend or Foe?''
Family hours: It's not just what we watch that divides families. It's the way we watch. Once upon a time, families watched Bonanza together. Now, with dozens of cable channels and multiple-TV households, parents and children scurry off to watch in solitude.
Sports: TV money has poisoned sports, but so has technical sophistication. Cameras that put us inches from a quarterback also crop the rest of the field, turning team sports into highlight films for individuals, encouraging a craving for attention that hatches role models like Dennis Rodman.
Cop shows: Research increasingly shows a direct link of TV violence to real crime. The glut of killings we passively witness causes exaggerated fear of crime, called ''mean world syndrome.''
But researchers say those ''grim reality'' cop shows are very unreal. TV women are three times more likely to be killers; whites commit 40 percent of homicides in real life, but 90 percent on TV. Typical TV bad guys are not drop-out junkies who fill prisons - they're businessmen.
Religion: When TV is not ignoring religion, it scorns our spiritual leaders and mocks Christians as ignorant, sanctimonious fools. TV's attitude toward religion is epitomized by Nothing Sacred, a fall show in which a Catholic priest tells a pregnant teen to ''follow her instincts'' on abortion.
Education: TV critic Michael Medved writes, ''The most recent analyses reveal that the major cable and broadcast networks titillate viewers with a new image every nine seconds on average. This quick editing contributes in an obvious and unmistakeable manner to the alarming decline in the American attention span . . . most obvious in preschool classrooms.''
News: Network news is more insipid, shallow, trivial and biased than ever. But worse than flagrant liberal slant is an inability to examine any issue without wallowing in emotion.
Complex issues of the government shut-down became ''boring national debt'' vs. ''federal worker who can't buy a Christmas tree.'' Tens of thousands of faceless, unborn children mutilated by partial-birth abortion were trumped by five crying women ''who couldn't live without it.
Media critic Mark Styn writes that ''virtually every in-depth investigation - on drunk driving, toxic waste, crime, housing policy, welfare - begins with a woman blinking back tears . . .''
As a medium, TV is perfect for conveying emotion. A single close-up tear rolling down a cheek always beats complex facts. As President Clinton has so skillfully demonstrated, liberal emotional arguments win; conservative reasoning loses.
Celebrity Games: Television has made us slaves to personal appearance. Looking ''good'' is a shorter path to moral superiority than actually doing any good. Our obsession with appearance is as superficial as the plywood TV houses where our imaginations fall asleep.
I watch TV. I'm not doing my share of the average American adult's six hours a day, but I watch sports from my coaching couch, cram for editorials with Professor Jim Lehrer and squander years of my life on old movies. I watch Frazier, Drew Carey and Seinfeld - but often feel like a sucker for laughing at embarrassingly raunchy themes and juvenile plots.
Given the choice between a nutritious biography of Albert Einstein and an NFL replay of Super Bowl III, I chose the Big Mac rerun. (The Jets still won).
Yes, I can turn it off - but I can't turn off its corrosive damage to our politics, culture and children.
So, like 65 percent of Americans, our family is watching television less - and enjoying each other more.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
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