My TV show starts nine feet under the American suburbs, in Erin Morrison’s basement.

That basement was a refuge. A nook to hide from the town above. Waste your youth watching horror movies and weird early internet videos. A cocoon without windows, incubated by central air.

My TV show starts on Friday, June 12, 2009, the night of the analog-to-digital switch-off. Maybe that date doesn’t mean anything to you, but if your high school experience was anything like mine, you probably remember the legally mandated deadline when every television network in America, be it local or national, was required to flip the switch and put analog broadcasting out of its misery forever. David Sawyer and Erin Morrison had been quietly anticipating the deadline all school year long. They were, of course, losers.

It had all been a long time coming. Analog broadcasting had spent at least a decade in the TV equivalent of hospice, and during that time, houses all over town had been leveling up to flat-screens and TiVos, banishing their old bulky sets to collect dust in attics and basements. Digital television was the future. It meant more channels, crisper picture quality. Analog television meant fuzzy images and . . . I don’t know, Dick Van Dyke reruns? Maybe back in the 1950s, all that had been a necessary stepping stone, but now analog was a relic, one whose government-mandated extinction date was way past due.

For David and Erin, the switch-off was an excuse for celebration. The best friends stayed up late that night, throwing themselves a two-person kegger in the basement with a bottle of Tito’s they “borrowed” from Erin’s mom’s liquor cabinet. As the hour approached, they traded swigs, passing the bottle back and forth from beanbag to couch, waiting for analog broadcasting to end and the digital era to begin. That’s what they would say on the news later that night (for the very first time broadcast exclusively over cable boxes and digital receivers): “The digital era has begun.”