Indeed it is, my friend. I think it's due to the necessity of needing a seat while watching a show or movie. Now TV owners are obsessed with hiding their screens behind faux art or recessing them into the walls. I don't understand why people hang them above the fireplace mantel. Heat and electronics don't mix.
<gripe over>
Rebelling against the TV was part of my overall adolescent rebellion. I stopped watching it altogether by the time I was 16, and didn't/wouldn't have one in my home until a new-at-the-time lover insisted in 1985 when I was 25. When we broke up I bought a giant one and a VCR: I never bothered with cable but would rent movies almost every night I wasn't planning on going out.
When I began designing and selling custom furniture in the mid-90s, the single most frequently requested item was a cabinet to hide the TV, complete with those retched, problematic and expensive slide-in "pocket doors". I never understood the logic behind spending thousands of dollars on the latest electronic equipment only to spend thousands more (and wait for many months) for a cabinet to make them all disappear!
But as this was the source of my income, I obliged them nicely
The holy grail of TV armoires was a corner unit, which everyone came in asking for but which no one would actually order because the cabinet would have to be monstrous to accommodate the enormous TVs everyone had. I even had measured drawings prepared in advance and put into a book to show how impractical, bulky and (occasionally) impossible such a request would actually be to have made. In the end, they'd "settle" for a beautiful, custom-made solid cherry library wall made up of multiple sections that bolted together rather like really exquisite kitchen cabinets.
My last job in the furniture industry was selling more commercially-manufactured stuff in what was called "European Contemporary" style, though most of it was made in Asia. By that time (2005), flat-screens were just becoming popular, but were still so expensive that people wanted to show them off, and racks were suddenly popular again after more than twenty years, along with sideboards; we'd stuff empty jewel cases in the cutlery drawers to show how they'd fit nicely.
When the Trinitron that I'd bought in 2000 finally died about a year and a half ago, I never bothered replacing it. I now watch everything I need to watch on my flat-screen computer monitor.
