TV Bitching
What's Playing In My Head: "Back On A Mission", by Cirrus
Quote of the Day: "I may have a face for radio, but you, sir, have a brain for television." - Freelance Genius
Back when I was in Charlottesville the first time (as in, when I was a student), I watched a lot of TV. I mean, a LOT of TV. Staying up until 4 am watching Comedy Central was a way of life. The 2 am repeat of South Park was a nightly yard marker en route to another late night. This was my life, people.
Post-graduation, it wasn't any different. After work, I'd get down in front of the TV and not get up until it was way past time to go to bed. Laptop locked on to the internet, TV in the background. I'd watch everything. I'd watch TV shows that I wasn't even vaguely, remotely interested in - as long as the warm glow of the TV was there, it was all good. God, I even watched American Idol.
Am I getting old? Or is TV just obsolete?
I'm sitting here in front of a fire with a 26-inch classic TV in front of me, waiting to be turned on. But I'm not. Why? I don't really care. I don't mean that I don't care about the reason, I mean that I don't really care about anything that could possibly be on right now, so why would I do that in the first place?
With very few exceptions (24, ER, Boston Legal, etc.), anything I really want to watch on TV I can download and watch later. I can get the newest theater-quality movies online, or on DVD. Even those shows I catch on TV I can watch later on. And the stuff I don't want to watch...I miss. Besides, most of the stuff I do want to watch wouldn't be on TV anyway. Any way you slice it, I just download it to my computer, transfer to my iAudio (think video iPod without the general Apple crappiness and proprietary Apple music format) and watch whenever I've got a slow afternoon. Or listen to it in the car on the way to and from work.
I know this theory has some flaws. If TV didn't exist, TV shows probably wouldn't get made, or at least not as many. You can't watch what doesn't exist. And then there's sports, which do add some value to TV.
But seriously, I don't really care what's on most of the time. And the worst thing is that the fraction of new shows I do like have this crappy habit of getting canned just as things start getting good. ABC is the worst at that, canning both DayBreak and InJustice in the last year (what, is it something about two-word shows pushed into one?). It's enough to make you kick your TV screen in.
I don't know what it is. Maybe TV is just crap.
Or maybe I'm just getting old.
posted by B.C. @ 12:32 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
ABC is streaming the rest of Daybreak on its website, for free, beginning sometime in February. The first one begins streaming tomorrow.
http://www.tvsquad.com/2007/01/22/good-news-for-day-break-fans/
Television is far from irrelevant - the distribution mechanisms are changing, which is pretty exciting for us consumers.
Heard about Daybreak being played online, but I didn't hear that they finally scheduled a start date. At least they're throwing me a bone.
Guess it depends on what you mean by "TV"...to me, that means what's on the physical, wood-grained box sitting in the floor in my family room. YMMV.
Well, don't discount the possibility that TV sucks *and* you're getting old.
In all seriousness, although I would agree that TV's gone downhill, I think the proliferation of channels, and the need to program them all, has created an effect similar to what you've noticed with YouTube: too much crap to sift through in order to find the good stuff. It is possible to have *too many* choices, I believe.
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