I don’t know if tv shows have gone downhill lately or if I’m just becoming a curmudgeon, but lately I’ve been completely disenchanted with t.v. I used to religiously watch a half a dozen shows, but now I’m down to 2 – Dexter (which has really gone downhill this season, IMO) and Big Bang Theory. The others that I used to love in their heyday (The Office, Three and a Half Men, Survivor, Grey’s Anatomy) are so past their prime that I don’t even DVR them anymore.
(I think their longevity is part of the reason that I am so disenchanted. I mean, there’s only so much juice you can get out of an orange and for some of these shows we were down to the bitter pulp a few years ago. Yet they keep churning them out.)
And sports – forget about it. I live in Cincinnati, and between the Bearcats and the Bengals, I get more ulcers than entertainment from watching them, so I just don’t watch at all.
I’ll occasionally watch half hour stand-alone shows such as House Hunters or Forensic Files, but for the most part, I’m pretty much “off” t.v. Most nights I’ll build a fire and do Soduko and leave the t.v. off entirely.
So is it just me or is anyone else experiencing a t.v. burnout? (Not that that’s a bad thing, just wondering.)
The tv is off here all week long. We DVR a few shows (Dexter, Two And A Half Men, Parenthood, Meteorite Men, Mythbusters, Big Bang Theory), and Friday/Saturday night boxing, whenever it’s on, but that’s about it.
My husband is an OTR truck driver, and if he’s lucky, he’s home on some weekends, and we’ll watch the DVR’d stuff then. Otherwise, the tv is off. Our daughter and I usually are on the computers, or reading. Not watching tv. It’s gotten to be quite boring.
I burned out on TV ten years ago and haven’t cared since then. As far as I’m concerned, networks are doing the human race a favor when they cram their schedules with stuff that’s not worth watching.
It seems like a lot of TV shows totally blow their load on one good season and then tank from there. Supernatural, Fringe, The Office, Lost, Prison Break, Heroes, the list goes on and on of shows that had like one good season, maybe more, but eventually rode their horse 'til it died of thirst and then proceeded to beat it.
We watch Mad Men, The Office, and Top Chef. But we don’t ever watch anything–except football–live. Ain’t NOTHING (except watching the Browns trounce the Pats) that’s worth commercial breaks.
Yes, I am. I have the new seasons of several shows on my tivo and I don’t have much interest in watching them. I attribute this to two factors:
Our kid is older and her bedtime is later. I don’t plop down in front of the tv until after 10 or 11. I don’t want to invest in a long show since I’ll be going to bed shortly and don’t really know when the next time I’ll be wathcing TV.
There is so much other stuff to entertain me. I can browse the web, facebook, scan pictures, stream movies, etc. Back when the choice was between TV and a book, TV won a lot. Now TV is just one of many choices.
I still follow a handful of my longtime favorites , though as noted, the quality is going downhill. (I’m simultaneously mourning the end of Lost and waiting impatiently for next year’s True Blood and Mad Men.) Nothing new in the last couple of years has held my interest, and I cannot stomach most ‘reality shows’. When I have the TV on at night just for background noise, it’s on the weather channel, Discovery Channel, or even the program guide. And I thank god every day for TCM. I would rather watch an old black and white classic movie any day than fat people exercising, yakking rich housewives, pregnant teenagers, or whatever else passes for entertainment now.
TV just isn’t exciting as it used to be. I remember back a couple years ago, there were so many good shows on TV (24, The Shield, Prison Break, Lost, Numbers, etc) that I couldn’t get enough, and I always had something I couldn’t wait to wait. These days, I barely notice or care if I go a whole week without watching TV. I’ve also changed up my watching strategy - 99% of what I watch is from my own internet-based DVR. I dropped cable 2 years ago and the only thing I ever watch live is the news.
After the mess that Lost turned into, I’m also extra skeptical about getting involved in any new serials. I didn’t watch a minute of Flashforward, and I’m not touching The Event.
Last season I was pretty much down to 2 shows, Lost and 24. Now that they’re both off the air, there’s nothing that really catches my interest. I try to catch 30 Rock, that’s still funny, although The Office… kinda isn’t, at least not as funny as it used to be. I get the bulk of my entertainment from reading books or various online thingamabobs.
I’ve been meaning to watch Supernatural (thank you, FandomSecrets), but I’m not sure when it comes on. Once I caught part of an episode on a Saturday, but that can’t be right, can it?
It comes on Friday nights at 8 or 9 I think. I dvr it and watch it on saturday nights since there is usually nothing on.
I’m loving tv these days.
American Chopper: Senior vs. Junior.
Stargate Universe.
Supernatural.
Smallville.
Vampire Diaries.
Fringe.
Big Bang Theory.
It’s Always Sunny in Philedelphia.
Santuary is starting again.
The Adult Swim line up.
Pretty much the only network show I watch is Hell’s Kitchen. I watch very few cable channels and I can’t think of maybe one or two shows that I watch regularly. Most shows I hear about that sound good, I can’t seem to get into. (Mad Men is a good example.)
90% of the time, I’m watching HBO, or a movie on either IFC, Indie, or Sundance, or I am watching a movie off my Wii from my Netflix queue. Sometimes I will find something to watch on In Demand, but rarely is that the case. I rely on Netflix for the most part, especially since so much TV can be watched that way. I’ve never had Showtime, but I’ve seen every episode of Weeds.
Anyway, I just wanted to float a suggestion. I think all sit coms should be limited to no more than a 3-year run and dramas, no more than 5-years. Reality shows get one season and that’s it. The novelty wears off after the first one and I don’t think any of 'em are worthwhile much after that (f they ever were at all).
The other 10% of the time, I’m flipping around news programs trying to figure out what’s going on. I like BBC America a lot; it’s about the most fair and unbiased news I can find.
I DVR quite a few shows, but I find myself speeding through a lot of them. The ones I really like still are NCIS, Detroit 187, Stargate Universe, Castle, Psych, Eureka, The Walking Dead and the Good Guys.
Apart from making the effort to see The Daily Show and Colbert, I randomly watch some stuff on HGTV and Comedy Central. My husband is a big TV fan, so he watches a lot of stuff that I see because I’m knitting in the same room, but if he wasn’t there, I’d be knitting in silence.
I know names of series because of on-line news or occasional commercials I happen to see, but I’ve never watched an episode of 30 Rock or How I met your Mother or Glee or, well, much of anything. And I really don’t much care.
And I agree about the longevity - when you know how the show will play out within the first 3 minutes, you know it’s become predictable and trite.
Oh god, I had to quit F!S because I kept having really wanky arguments there that did bad things to my blood pressure. It did get me to start watching Doctor Who, though, which is cool.
Supernatural is on Fridays at nine, but if you’ve never seen it, you might want to set your DVR for the reruns on TNT on weekday mornings, because they’re running earlier seasons. I’m not sure how comprehensible the current season is if you’ve never seen it before - and if your only exposure is through shipping wars raged via F!S, you may be surprised to learn that none of the main characters are in sexual relationships with each other. :rolleyes:
Anyway, I spent the last two years in grad school, and the two years before that in a village in the Balkans. I barely even know what’s on TV these days. I like watching reality shows on Bravo, basically.
I generally wait for shows to get canceled and watch them on DVD, which both avoids getting invested in something that is going to go roundly off the rails (such as Lost or 24) and allows me to watch the show in a tight sequence, which improves the impact of story arcs. American networks generally try to stretch as much as they can out of a show, which I think is unfortunate, because many shows have just so much story to offer and once they are done are left begging for a new story to follow; the poster child for this is Veronica Mars, of which the first season was phenomenal clockwork plotting and character development, and the subsequent seasons were trying to recreate the same story in a highly contrived fashion. I think the British have the right idea with limited run shows like The Office, State of Play, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which have an essential story and theme, and don’t end up in hyperbolic territory by trying to outdo the previous plot revelation. HBO’s The Wire also did pretty well about this by at least changing the focus of every series to a different aspect of Baltimore (the drug trade, the docks, political corruption, education, the media), so even though they had the same core cast of characters they were secondary to the action, and the “Anyone Can Die” trope was really as unpredictable as it needs to be to work (versus, say, 24, where it was really "Anyone but Jack Bauer can die if it makes the episode more shocking).
There is some great television being produced, but not by the major networks.