I am in the generation of adults that were raised on television. From Saturday morning cartoons, to Sesame Street, I was often lying in front of our giant television with my eyes glued and my brain shut down.
Some of my first memories revolve around television. I remember my parents paying to get Wrestlemania on pay per view. I remember learning life's lessons from GI Joe (... and knowing is half the battle!). I remember feeling like an adult when my parents let me watch Dallas with them. I remember hurrying through meals so that we could watch The Dukes of Hazzard (Just'a good ol' boys Never meanin' no harm). I remember seeing President Reagan's inaugural address.
And more than early memories, I can tell parts of my life through what I was watching on television. Late elementary school was MTV (when it played music videos). Jr High School was the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation. High School was the time of Quantum Leap. Early College was Friends and ER. Chicago was Good Eats (or at least it's public television precursor). Detroit was West Wing and the Sopranos. Nursing school was House MD. Waiting for a job was NCIS, NCIS LA, Parenthood, Blue Bloods and MANY more. Even now, when my television viewing has returned to a trickle, it's Person of Interest, Elementary and The Walking Dead.
Television has changed a LOT in the years since I woke up early to eat cereal and watch cartoons. For the longest time we had about five channels and no remote control. Well... Dad had three remote controls; my two brothers and I. There was NBC, ABC, and CBS. The other channels were local independent stations, and those were always fun as they would show movies a lot of the time. Eventually those independent stations became Fox, UPN, or 'MyTV' affiliates. My family got cable in the early 80s and even had HBO for awhile. I think before I went away to college we had a total of like 40 channels. The year I was away to college I was again reduced to local affiliates and independent channels. That got repeated for the last time when I lived in Chicago.
Currently we have Xfinity cable. Through years of dickering and dealing we've ended up with their top tier of programming. I believe it's about 200 channels. We recently 'upgraded' to their X1 service and had to create a single list of our 'favorite' channels (before X1 we had four separate 'favorite' lists). It includes about 125 different channels. If I had to shave that down to the ones I watch most often, I could probably get it to 40... but I prefer to have the 125 all available for easy consumption. About the only channels I completely disregard are the children's channels.
For the longest time television was appointment viewing. For example Friday night as a child was all about the Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas. Wednesday nights as a young(er) adult were all about West Wing. Sometime around 2004 I bought a DVR, and that's when my viewing habits really changed. I primarily bought it so that I could record certain shows while I was away on photo gigs, but I soon started catching and recording other things like Friends repeats. I also started to watch television without commercials. When the program was recorded previously that was easy enough, but even live television would be watched this way. If I wanted to watch the new episode of The West Wing at 9pm, I would start recording it and flip through other channels for 15 or so minutes. When enough time passed I'd start playing the recording and skip through the commercials. I got good enough at this task that I could catch up to the live broadcast and finish the program 'on time'.
Another thing the DVR opened up for me was catching up on a show long after it had started. For instance I recall watching an episode of House and enjoying it. The only problem was that it was on it's third or fourth season. Well... it was also in sindication. So I set up the DVR to record those shows and eventually caught all the episodes I'd missed. By the time the finale rolled around I had watched all of the episodes.
Between graduating nursing school and getting my current job I watched a LOT of television. Both live and recoreded shows. For the most part between the hours of 8pm and 11pm I was watching television every night. Sure, I caught some movies on DVD, but the shows that flick repalced would just be watched later in the week. This job, however, changed everything.
I now work between the hours of 1:30pm and 10pm. Add in the hour drive and I miss all of primetime television. For awhile I still recorded the same shows and tried to catch up before heading into work or on my days off, but I quickly realized that I didn't care about most of the shows I was watching. Did I really want to spend an hour (or 45 minutes without the commercials) to watch Parenthood? So, I narrowed down the list of shows that I did indeed want to watch. There are currently only two network shows that I record and catch every week; Person of Interest and Elementary. I also record and watch The Walking Dead, Top Gear (both the British and American versions), and This Old House Hour (that's just This Old House and Ask This Old House in one show).
That's it.
With our current glut of channels I spend the rest of my 'television' time watching movies. Between HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, and of course the cable networks like AMC, FX, TBS, TNT, Spike, and others, I have a wide selection of movies to record and watch later.
And then there's Netflix. I was a fairly early adopter of Netflix. I always loved watching Movies but hated driving to the video rental place and finding something to watch. Invariably the movie that I wanted to find was all rented out so I would have to spend 20 or 30 minutes perusing their aisles and find something else. Netflix was like mana from heaven... just make a list of all the movies I wanted to watch and they'd deliver the DVDs straight to me! I even caught up with some television series that way. I started watching the Sopranos before I had a subscription to HBO.
For the past few years at home with Mom, Netflix has been regulated to the summer when there wasn't enough on network television to watch. A couple years ago my friends cut the cable out of their lives. Instead of paying for live television, they decided to have their viewing habits satisfied through streaming services. Netflix, Hulu and other services meant that they could catch all their favorite shows and have a wide variety of shows for their kids to watch at any time.
So this year I'm trying something similar. We still have Cable and I don't see that changing... but when we got Netflix this year we added the streaming service. I mean why not... it's free for the first month. I thought it would be another fun diversion as they have a lot of older movies there. But then came 'Mad Men'. I've heard over and over and over that Mad Men is a wonderfully great show that I would just adore. It's often compared (quality wise) to my favorite show; The West Wing. With the streaming service up for a month and our BluRay player having a Netflix app, I started watching Mad Men. I won't bother to review it, but I'm hooked. There are currently no 'new' shows to record so when I plop in front of the TV in the mornings before work I cue up Mad Men and start watching.
I enjoy the process enough that I'm adding other older series to watch. Breaking Bad and American Horror Story are on the deck waiting for me to catch up with 6 seasons of Mad Men.
I was going to go into what I look for in a televsion series... but I'm not sure that I can really quantify that down to a distinct list. Here are some things though that I need to have;
Snappy Dialog. Aaron Sorkin is the absolute best at this. The West Wing, Sport Night, Studio 60, and his current show News Room all have the best dialog I've ever heard. Both Person of Interest and Elementary have this as well, just not as much.
Good Characters with Character Development. I don't mean good characters as in 'kind loving christian family' types... I mean characters that are more than 'The Cop' or 'The Criminal'. Characters whos lives are not defined by what they do. These characters should also change over time. A good example of this is 'Josh' from The West Wing. He starts of as fairly idealistic. He gains confidence and soon grows cocky. He loses pretty big and gets almost gun shy. Another would be 'Glenn' from The Walking Dead. He starts out as fairly shy and nervous, grows confident and eventually changes his priorities as he falls in love. Neither of these character developments happened all at once, nor did they happen quickly. They were just natural progressions of how these 'people' live their lives and how they changed as their worlds changed around them.
Continuing Storylines. I actually really dislike procedural dramas. Cop Shows, Lawyer Shows, Doctor Shows. They all have their forumla and stick to it. Season five of these shows isn't all that different from season one. Sure, things change in all shows, for instance a character dies and is replaced by a new version... but the new character and the show itself is just a variation on it's previous theme. A good example of what I like is Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Yes... each show is about the crew of this deep space station as they deal with some new threat or event. But over the course of the series we get to witness the evolution of the Bajoran religious and political system. We watch the Cardasian's grow, fail, and eventually come back more powerful than ever. And of course we get to watch Sisko evolve as The Emissary. For comparison lets look at Star Trek The Next Generation. They're exploring space, finding new things, and dealing with them. That's about it. An episode from the sixth season could just as easily sit in the first season. I like The Next Generation... I LOVE Deep Space Nine.
I guess if I'm giving a taste of what I love in shows, I should go over some things that I hate.
Reality TV. I can't put ALL of reality TV into this catergory, but the vast majority of it is just pure crap. It seems to follow one of two scenarios... 'follow a person's (or group's) life' or 'take a person (or group) and put them in a new situation'. But just like scripted television this only matters if you like the subject matter and the 'characters'. I do (did) like 'Dirty Jobs' and 'Deadliest Catch'. I watched 'American Chopper' for awhile but that show changed over time. To me, it started out as watching these bike creators run their company. They made specialty bikes that was the focus of several shows. Eventually though, the show seemed to be how these people dealt with being part of a reality show. That's just a bit to meta for me.
One thing that I really hate about most reality shows is how they tease and re-introduce each part around the comercial break. They seem to spend about a minute before each break telling you what is about to happen. Then after each break they spend about a minute or two recapping what happened and give a big tease about what is going to happen now. I swear, if they took all that out they could shrink most of these shows down to a half hour!
Shows with more than one focus. Take the Daily show for example. I adore the first half or so of each episode. The equivalent of the John Stewart monologue. The rest of the show I could do without. The interviews, the staged news events... those just bore me. Since I can't watch the entire show, I rarely catch it at all. In face I bet I've seen more of the Daily Show as youtube clips than I've seen on an actual television. I could also add in most late night shows into this. I like most of their monologues (LOVE Craig Ferguson's!), but switch it off after that part is done.
I guess that's all I have to say for now. Television is still a primary entertainment tool for me, and like everything in life it's changing and evolving.
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