Too much sleep can ruin your TV watching

Paul Sassone

Updated: June 4, 2012 11:29AM

Sleep is the enemy of television.

You know what I mean: You can be feeling just fine, well rested, not stressed at all. Yet, all you have to do is sit down and turn on the TV and  — presto — the second inning of a ball game becomes the sixth inning as if by magic; and Jack Webb meting out justice from 40 years ago becomes an informercial for a pan that is so great at not sticking you can fry rocks in it (if you want fried rocks for some reason).

All this transformation creeps upon you because you have fallen asleep while watching TV.

Maybe a sleep attack is a subconscious way our brain has of telling us that we should be reading Anna Karenina or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire instead of wasting our little grey cells on mental junk food, i.e., television.

I don’t know. All I know is that I fall asleep a lot while watching TV. And a lot of you do, too.

Falling asleep while watching TV is not restful, either.

It is an annoyingly incomplete experience.

Just the other night I stumbled across the beginning of a movie on one of those twenty-something channels. It was called “Company Business.’’ I started to watch because it was a movie I hadn’t seen starring one of my favorite actors, Gene Hackman. 

Made in 1991, this was a spy film about America and the Soviet Union exchanging agents, complications, dangers, escapes, pursuit, double agents, double-double agents, etc. Hackman was American, of course. Mikhail Baryshnikov was a Soviet, but a good guy nonetheless.

It was an OK movie — no “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,’’ but an OK movie. 

I was involved — and conscious — as the story unfolded, even able to coincide trips to the bathroom with commercial breaks in the film. 

We had just learned that one of the characters was in reality not a loyal American but an agent for the Soviet Union.

Suddenly credits started rolling across my TV screen.

What happened? I almost shouted.

My wife looked up from her book, “Oh, I guess it’s over.’’

But who was the double agent? How did it end?

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t watching.’’

So, do any of you know how “Company Business’’ ended? I looked it up on the Internet, but the Internet never gives away the ending. If you know, please drop me a line.

I’d do the same for you.

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