“When the TV is on all day without rest, Mama knows it's too much and Mama knows best.”
—Opening quote
The Berenstain Bears and Too Much TV is a book in the Berenstain Bears series by Stan & Jan Berenstain. It was first published on April 12, 1984.
It was later adapted into an episode of the same name for the 2002 TV series The Berenstain Bears.
Summary[]
Mama notices that the cubs and Papa have been watching too much TV lately and places them on a weeklong TV ban, prompting them to find other things to do.
Plot[]
After school one day, Mama was inside the treehouse making after-school snacks for Brother and Sister as they were coming home from school. After the bus stops in front of their house, Brother and Sister both race inside the treehouse, get their snacks, and race to the living room to watch TV. Papa later joined the cubs in watching TV after coming in from his workshop, and Mama notices that the entire family had been watching too much TV.
The more the Bear family watched TV, the less things they did such as talking at the table during dinner, and the cubs playing outside. One evening after dinner, the cubs run into the living room to watch The Nutty Bear Show, but Mama stops them and bans both the cubs and Papa, who was about to watch a sports show, from watching TV for a week. Mama then introduces him to the newspaper so he could catch up on the news and shows him that he could hold his hand outside to see if it's raining. She gets comfortable in a rocking chair.
Not long after, the Bear family sits to have a discussion, but they forgot how to do so, and Papa drifts off to sleep shortly after. After school the next day, the cubs looked at the TV, but are shooed out of the treehouse to play. The cubs did things such as riding their bicycles. Later that evening, as the cubs did their homework, Sister eyes an advertisement about a special on TV and asks Mama if they could watch it. Mama, however, stands firm with her weeklong TV ban and the family goes outside on their front lawn to look at the stars in the sky and learn about nocturnal animals.
Over the next few days, the Bear family did things such as go on a nature walk, watching tadpoles hatch, seeing an orb spider make a spider web, and even went shopping at the Bear Country Mall. While there, Papa sneaks off to the TV store to watch a game show, but Brother and Sister catch him. Late one night, the cubs catch Papa trying to circumvent the TV ban as he was downstairs in the living room preparing to watch a late-night movie.
On their last day of their TV ban, Mama tells Brother that she has nothing against watching TV, but rather sitting in front of the TV doing nothing. The mention of TV prompted Brother, Sister, and Papa to get ideas about sitting in front of the TV all day. However, the next day, Papa was the only one to watch TV all day as Mama read a book, Brother did his cube puzzle, and Sister started knitting a rug. Papa eventually gets bored of watching TV and goes outside to catch some trout using his fishing rod and some bait.
Publication history[]
- 1984, Random House (Paperback)
Trivia[]
- Stan and Jan Berenstain planned to adapt this book into an episode of the 1985 Saturday morning cartoon, but CBS (the network airing the series) rejected it. The 2002 TV series adaptation of the episode was produced largely without Stan and Jan Berenstain, and is considerably different from the book.