Ever since i was a little girl… did I say girl? thats weird… I was a boy. Anyway, ever since I was wearing fairy dresses and waving a wand around (this time i was playing the fairy godmother in a pantomime, don’t worry though I did it ironically), I’ve pretty much been brought up on television. I learnt my ABCs by the NBCs, BBCs, ITVs, CBSs, WBs, UPNs and well ok ABCs of prime-time and i have to say, mum what the hell were you thinking?

Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of me and the person that television has made me, but Friends had me thinking that there was a constant sexual tension between me and my classmates when I was 7. Buffy had me patrolling the garden for vampires with a wooden stake i’d made from a broken picture frame when I was 9. Lois and Clark made me think that it was ok to lie and that Lex Luthor had hair. Dawsons Creek had me expecting sex as soon as my best friend grew boobs and don’t even get me started on Oz. With a bit of hindsight under my belt, I can clearly see how this has affected the way I live my life. First-off I live life like its a sitcom, it is my ultimate fantasy to walk into a room and say something like “Is it me or is it really hot outside” and have everyone in the room turn around and say “It’s you” at the same time, and then of course have a studio audience justify it with howling laughter. I have a lot of fun with this but its ultimately disappointing when no one catches on and i don’t get the banter that Will & Grace promised me I would have. And I also live life extremely naive of the kind of life every one else is living when i compare it with the life I lead and have expected from tv. Coming to the end of my teens which I pretty much spent locked away watching tv, I can tell you that I didn’t get the voice-over that the Wonder Years promised me, the sex that the O.C. promised me, the drugs of Skins,  the family of Gilmore Girls, the adventure of Buffy or the even the lack of work-pressure that Moonlighting told me i could have (I mean come on, no one breaks the fourth wall as much as Cybill Shepard does if you’re not pretty laid back). So with this in mind, this is what i’d been expecting from life and my teens, but the joke is that when I heard of kids doing drugs and having sex, I was just shocked and appalled. We were all in the same race and no had told me that we’d started, so they must be cheating right? These kids were ignorantly doing things and having experiences that i’d been learning about and dreaming about for years, they didn’t understand the romance, the montage, or the arc that came with these milestones. But I was ready, so why wasn’t it happening? It turns out that while I was fantasising about life experiences as a montage and an epic three season arc, my fellow teens were just living life.

I’m not shy by any means, but what I am is extremely romantic thanks to late-night prime-time. And the burden of this mindset means that i’m not going to make a move unless I know it can draw ratings. Watching the Sean show for the past 19 and a half years, i’m kind’ve of invested in my character’s journey and I don’t want him to have a mindless fling, I want him to have a house-collapsing, cubicle-bashing, self-sacrificing love affair with a co-lead. And it needs to be perfect. I appreciate that no one can really get this, and to be honest no one should really have to, but I can tell you right now that someone’s going to take this show of the air if it doesn’t get exciting pretty damn soon.

This is starting to sound like I blame TV for all my problems, which I most certainly don’t. It’s just that when the most emotional memories in your own life are Buffy killing Angel to save the world, Ross cheating on Rachel, Marissa dying, Walter White running over a couple of drug dealers looking at you and saying “Run”, then there has to be something wrong. I have lived the most exciting lives from soaking up these worlds and these characters and hot damn if it hasn’t turned me into a pretty cool guy, but unfortunately I’ve been sheltered from the real world so much that I don’t even know what it looks like anymore. I don’t know how to live in a world that doesn’t know who’s in its main cast. Who do I end up with? Who are my friends? What do I end up doing? What will my life turn out to be? Have I been dead all along?

There’s honestly no turning back now so all I can really do is sit back and hope that by the time i’m 30 i’ll be experienced enough to play an attractive 16 year old on prime time. And If nothing else, I can almost definitely say that I am the product of some of the smartest and most creative writing on TV from over the past two decades… fart.