Do You Suffer from “TV Too High”?

Today, there’s a cure

Jim Nolan
2 min readMay 27, 2023
Illustration by Isabella Bannerman

I had never heard of it. But there’s an entire Reddit forum called “TV Too High.” As you might infer, TTH happens when people mount their flat screen TVs… too high. So whoever is watching has to crane their necks like they were sitting in the front row of the movie theater.

Once you’ve heard of it, you’ll see it everywhere, maybe even, in your own house. TVs mounted above the fireplace are a classic example. They kinda look good there, but they’re kinda hard to watch. Personally, I like to watch my beloved YouTube videos directly in front of me. I don’t want to have to wear a neck brace after watching folks mow overgrown yards, unclog drainage pipes, or power wash moldy British patios. After all, the whole point is to enter a state of total mindlessness, as far from thoughts of Ron DeSantis as possible, and a sore neck brings you back to reality. Let me stay in the Matrix a while. Maybe it was a sore neck that made Neo get a bee in his bonnet and harsh everyone’s vibe.

Back in the day, TTH wasn’t an issue. You couldn’t mount your giant Magnavox console TV on the wall, in fact, the floor could barely support it. People used to have children just so they could tell them to get up and change the channel. With the advent of remotes, the birthrate plummeted. If it weren’t for our dependence on our kids explaining how to use our iPhones, society would collapse. And even worse, Social Security payouts.

On Reddit, someone has posted a photo of a TV Way Too High in a, get this, brain and spine center. The comments are as funny as the photo:

“Most of our business is repeat customers.”

“If it wasn’t broken before you went in, it surely will be on your way out.”

“They are creating their own clientele. Clever.”

“It’s one-stop shopping. Get neck pain and then treat it there.”

My son Eddie, who wised me up about TV Too High, has his own flat screen installed above his fake fireplace in his small New York apartment. There’s no other place for it. But it is not too high. You see, Eddie purchased a motorized TV mount that, with the click of a button, slowly moves the screen forward several inches past the mantlepiece and then lowers itself a couple feet before coming to a gentle stop. When he first showed me this, I imagined I was with Hef at the Playboy Mansion. Any anger I had that flying cars had not yet become a reality vanished. This, right here, right in front of me, was the height of civilization. Eye level.

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Jim Nolan
Jim Nolan

Written by Jim Nolan

Jim’s humor writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Funny Times, HumorOutcasts.com, McSweeneys Internet Tendency, and on WBFO public radio.

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