"In 1997, the alt-rock band Harvey Danger had a minor hit with the song 'Flagpole Sitta.' One of the lines from the song was, 'And I don’t even own a TV'..."

"... which was a phrase a certain kind of person used to say a lot during this era. It was a sign of pretension, but also code for brainpower and maturity—a person without a television was not a slave to passivity, since passivity was the only possible outcome from interacting with a medium whose job was to fill time. Though accepted as true by virtually every knee-jerk intellectual of the time, it’s increasingly difficult to understand why TV was considered so inferior to not just film, but to almost every other variety of entertainment from this era. The prevalence of that dismissive view clearly had no relationship to its popularity—statistically speaking, television was more popular than everything. But here again: In the nineties, that was its own kind of problem. If everyone enjoyed something, how good could it possibly be?"

From Chuck Klosterman's "The Nineties" (pp. 232-233)(noting that critics considered "Frasier" brilliant television because it had characters who were the kind of people who would never watch television).