Steeply's father and M*A*S*H (Fathers and Sons)
My own father, sometime around midlife. We watched him get consumed with a sort of entertainment. It wasn’t pretty. I was never sure how it started or what it was about.
Context
The whole scene is a son reconstructing his father's death by entertainment, and it opens with the thesis stated flat. Steeply's father — a heating-oil dispatcher in Troy, NY — is slowly consumed by an attachment to the television program MAS*H, and the son "watched him get consumed," never sure how it began. The dyad is the reconstruction itself: the counterterror agent whose current assignment is a lethally consuming Entertainment turns out to be the boy who already watched a man he loved dissolve into a screen. That the father's fatal object was "a plain old television program," broadcast and canned-laughtered, only sharpens it — the son learned before anyone that a father can be eaten alive by something that isn't even very good.