Pat Clark: Television is becoming the Boo! tube

Watching TV can be scary. And I’m not saying that because today is Halloween.

It’s just that with all sorts of factual health scares in the news – sadly, too many deadly – combined with certain genres of fictional television shows, a person can get a little jumpy.

Case in point: me.

I was minding my business last weekend, not feeling jumpy at all, waiting at the checkout at one of our larger superstores. I’d already begun placing a couple of items on the little black conveyor belt when, to my left and out of nowhere, an older man suddenly poked me in the arm and pointed to … well, I’m not certain what he was pointing to, to be honest. I think he may have grunted something, but I was too startled to decipher any of it.

The thing is, I don’t like to be touched by strangers. Unless there’s emergency medical attention involved, not ever. Period. I don’t touch strangers and I expect the same courtesy back. We are, after all, strangers. Touching is reserved for family and friends and the occasional close co-worker. Stranger touching is not only irritating, it can be creepy.

And that’s what this store incident was: creepy. To be far, it’s likely the man simply was pointing to a shorter line – at least that was the general direction in which his finger was aiming. But it was a 10-item-or-less line, and I clearly had at least double that in my cart. So if he was trying to be helpful, I appreciate the gesture, but it wasn’t really applicable.

Besides, if you’re going to be helpful to strangers – and I certainly encourage everyone to be as helpful to strangers as possible – an imperative rule of thumb should be to:

Use. Your. Words.

Not. Your. Fingers.

So, even though he probably was a nice guy trying to do a nice thing, it was creepy. It wasn’t just the verboten stranger tactile thing, either; it was creepy because – and, yes, this seems like a non sequitur – the night before, my son and I had watched a recent episode of “Gotham.”

What could that possibly have to do with an idle incident in a store checkout line? Nothing. Except the episode was about some creepers handing out deadly viruses to innocent passers-by on the street of the fictional creeper-hangout city where Batman was born.

Combine that little TV tidbit still in my brain with the constant barrage of health scare news beamed daily from our screens – not to mention the coming onset of flu season – and that simple poke in the arm was alarming.

Irrationally, of course, but that’s what a little TV watching these days can do to a person. A lot of the television shows on the air right now seem to be out to not only entertain the masses, but also to scare the beejeebers out of us.

Again, not because it’s Halloween.

Regular old series television has taken a dark turn, with a lot of occult, supernatural and/or horror shows vying for viewer attention. And a lot of those shows are getting plenty of it: Think “American Horror Story,” “Grimm,” “Dracula,” “Bates Motel,” just on a short list.

Then there’s “Sleepy Hollow.” Now I’m a huge – huge! – fan of this Fox show, but it’s all about people battling witches, ghouls, demons and, natch, a headless horseman to hold off the fast-approaching apocalypse. Does it get any scarier than a fast-approaching apocalypse?

Oh, yeah, it does – a zombie apocalypse, via “The Walking Dead.”

Even without all the otherworldly fare, there still is a bevy of crime and cop procedural dramas, which can be even scarier because they’re frighteningly real-world possible: “Blacklist,” “CSI,” “Criminal Minds,” “Law and Order: SVU,” “Legends,” “The Following,” the aforementioned “Gotham” (which straddles the crime drama/otherworldly fence). Oh, there are more of them, and it’s series like these that make you wonder if everyone out there is a crazed killer/kidnapper/stalker.

Look, I’m not proud that a man’s seemingly innocent poke at the checkout counter pretty much ruined my afternoon. But, real or imagined, the world can be a scary place to live. TV wants to remind us of that on almost every channel.

On television, apparently, it’s Halloween all year.

This story was originally published October 30, 2014 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Pat Clark: Television is becoming the Boo! tube."