Oh, I would take NTSC artifacts (dot crawl and color bleed) any day over MPEG artifacts and signal breakup. The analog signals would fade, but they didn’t freeze and the sound didn’t cut out. The main advantage of digital TV is that it frees up bandwidth for HD transmission. HDTVs are also poor at handling standard-definition stuff unless you get an expensive upscaler box.
If you still want a traditional TV, you can try and get ahold of a CRT security monitor. There are still loads of them around and they’re basically just TVs without a tuner.
The local Salvation Army has huge Sony Wega’s for $50.