SciFi Wife has been buried, once again, in television. I suppose this is the trouble with not having TV. Systematic deprivation eventually leads to an unhealthy fixation. Perhaps a better alternative would be slow and steady exposure.
Let me back up. We cut the cable off shortly after Tracy gave birth to bigR. She spent her last insomnia-ridden trimester watching The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and TJ Hooker into the early morning hours. We found our weekends consumed by run after run of Overhaulin‘ and Monster House and Monster Garage. A desire to free ourselves from such time-consuming fixtures, coupled with our severe lack of cash flow, lead us to pull the plug on cable television.
We have been cable-free for nearly four years.
“How can one survive with no television?!”, you may ask. “The internets”, I would reply. Any show we desperately must watch, we download. We used to stay up to the week-to-week of such favorites as Family Guy, CSI, and My Name is Earl, but after the War, there’s nothing we watch with any regularity.
These days, our television comes torrentially (no pun intended, for the P2P savvy among us); that is, we download and burn through an entire series in very short order, followed by a period of little to no viewing activity. Twin Peaks was watched in its entirety in a matter of four days. Arrested Development took longer, but only just. Miami Vice? That one took some time, but it was all five seasons. Tracy’s current fix? Battlestar Galactica (the new one).
So, while our mailbox has been free of a Time Warner Cable bill for a handful of years, I have stretched to capacity several hard drives of The Twilight Zone, Dr. Who, LOST, Heroes, Supernanny, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Family Guy, Knight Rider, The A-Team, The Office … and have even left some room for the kiddos, in the form of Fraggle Rock, Rainbow Brite, She-Ra, He-Man, The Smurfs, Spiderman (the cartoon from the 60s!), The Care Bears, Thundercats, Transformers, Voltron ….
One might argue we would be better off with actual cable TV? Pshaw, show me The Care Bears and MST3K on regular cable TV. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m missing a few episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force ….
OMG!!! Yes! BSG is so bad ass! I burned through the miniseries, the 3 seasons, the webisodes, Razor, and then the first 10 ep’s of season 4 in just a few weeks, watching about two a night. I love that show. It starts up with the last 10 episodes of the show in January.
So.. should I call up and spoil who all but the last cylon is? And a co-worker and I are pretty sure we’ve figured out who the last cylon actually is, too!
@frank: You should know 99% of this TV viewing is done by Tracy. “I just sleep.”
Nate loves BSG. I don’t get it, really. Nor do I understand his other favorite show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
I haven’t paid for tv watching in about six months, and it’s kind of awesome. I still pay Time Warner for cable internets, but $45 a month for 8 Mbps seems worth it, especially since it had been over $100 a month before that.
That’s not very fair. I could make a very similar post about your computer time. Now I feel like a big jerk!!
@tracy: I’d venture to say you spend more time on the TV late at night than I do on the computer! But that’s a simple matter of my physical exhaustion. Had I the virility of my youth, I’d surely outlast you any day!
Well, I do it in bursts. I’ll spend a week immersed in a show and then not really watch anything for several more weeks until I find myself obsessed once again for another burst. You, on the other hand, are immersed in a different fashion but similarly obsessed.
Should we stop this comparison now? Let’s. I’m sorry for starting it in the first place
ePenis competition is coming..
MST3K IS totally awesome. I too have found myself watching the guilty pleasures in my 3rd trimester insomnia. Rock the Reception and Gilmore Girls make the top of my list. Of course I will deny it completely during daylight hours.