All right. I went on the Prime website and ided some 8 possibilities - including a couple of possible rewatches (Castle and Elementary.) We’ll see how it goes. Just not used to having to do freaking homework to watch TV! 
I feel like “homework” is your path to a peaceful evening. Maybe research shows from time to time, and discuss possibilities with your wife over the breakfast table, so you have something lined up at bed time.
Most of my career has been in the “cable” TV industry (including satellite and then OTT/streaming services), a lot of which has been around developing program guides for “content discovery” and the systems that enable them.
Back in 2013, a colleague made a presentation called “Why Television Works” (link to a YouTube below). At the time the industry was dealing with the emergence of alternatives to what’s now known (derisively) as “linear TV” and the presentation contrasts that model with the unlimited choice being proposed by Netflix or Apple TV, and points out that linear offers
There is lot of research into the idea that people say they want choice (in all areas of their lives) but typically fall into the same patterns - they’ll have dozens of cookbooks but eat the same 10 meals for family dinner, or a closet full of clothes but mostly wear the same few outfits. TV is a passive medium and people don’t want to have to work at it to zone out at the end of the day.
Around the same time, The Onion ran a headline that is describes some of the comments above: “Netflix Offers Unlimited Browsing.” And that made me remember all the times in the video store that the only titles that caught my eye were ones I’d already seen.
The advantage of “linear” TV is that it automatically narrows the choices for you - but it also gives you two things that giant catalogs can’t.
First, content discovery is facilitated by actually joining something you might want to watch and learning much more about it by watching a few seconds than any poster or text description can.
Second is serendipity - finding something familiar but unexpected, like the other day when I clicked past TMC, which was showing “Desk Set” and realizing that it was Beaver Cleaver’s teacher (Sue Randall) as one of the researchers, so I stuck with it and saw the fears of automation taking work, apropos today but from 1957.
Here’s the link - 20 minutes, and pretty interesting if you have the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la5G3Vdfuo0. The start of the discussion of choice starts around 7min in.
So to answer the OP - I decide by turning it on and surfing through my main (linear) channels, and if something strikes me, I watch it, with the freedom to change if a commercial comes on. SOMETIMES I’ll check out something I’ve heard about from one of the streamers, but that typically involves coordinating with my wife, thinking about whether we’ll devote multiple sessions to viewing a series, etc. At that point, it’s easier to just stick with linear.
I used to get my recommendations from Social Media, but as that has become more fractured, and there are no Networks on Bluesky yet, I’ve had to rely on general osmosis more.
I have a Schedule website I go to, which updates with new upcoming shows every month, but that is limited to certain genres, and I pay attention to what some of my favourite actors are up to.
I’m sure I’m missing out on a bunch of good stuff by doing it this way.
Yesterday - success! (At least for 1 episode.). Warehouse 13. Totally silly concept, far from perfect. But it is weird how a show’s writing, acting, filming can so quickly signal entertainment quality (at least as we judge it.)
Perhaps food for a different thread - what are the factors that make a show/movie good or bad? (Likely unanswerable given individual taste.)
Thanks for the informed and informative post. I’ve never been one who thought increased choice necessarily better - on the TV screen, in the grocery, selecting utility providers…
We had never watched Grey’s Anatomy before. Watched 2 eps yesterday, and looks like it is worth sticking with for at least a while. Everything I read says folk perceive a drop off after some point, but we should get at least 50-100 or more eps out of it. We get the DVDs from our library.
I get recommendations from friends but also from the Prime, Netflix and Disney apps too. Before I start watching through I always check IMDB to see what the average user thinks of it, and more importantly whether it is a show that has been cancelled part way through. I rarely watch anything as soon as it comes out because the streamers seem very quick to cancel things these days.
We only watch a couple of hours per night, and those are often stuff from the DVR. When we look for new stuff we look through the listings on some streaming services, BritBox and MHz, and see if anything looks interesting. We’ll abandon stuff rapidly if we don’t like it.
My wife watches some British, Irish or European mysteries at lunch, and I’m going through Alfred Hitchcock after she leaves in the evening (only half an hour.) We’re in the middle of a whole bunch of series, and we have enough “Murder In”s (a French detective anthology show) to last us the rest of our natural lives.
I miss the days where you would turn on the TV to see what was on and watch that.
Nowadays, Inna and I ‘binge’ shows, if watching an hour a night and making it all the way through Better Call Saul or The Sopranos or Deadwood or whatever can be defined as ‘binging’.
I think the last time my TV was even turned on was during the NHL playoffs last spring. Actually maybe later because I think my son and his wife were by after that, but we watched movies, not TV shows.
When people talk about current TV series, I have no idea what they’re talking about. I can’t stand broadcast TV, mainly because of the incessant obnoxious commercials. Television itself is a wonderful technology, and I enjoy using it for watching movies. But if I’m watching a movie alone, a high-definition Android tablet provides a wonderful nearly theatrical experience, since I’m near-sighted without glasses and a tablet screen at close range occupies much of my field of view.
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I believe that ‘research’ was flipping to the online ‘TV-Guide’ which showed what was on now/ the next (half-) hour
-* was, past-tense. Don’t even do that much anymore. Mostly it’s if I want to watch some live, free TV sports event (I don’t pay for any apps/services) then I’m tuning to a specific channel at a specific time.
Me neither. That’s the joy of a DVR - we record everything, and skip the commercials. The closest we come to live TV is if we start to watch from the beginning when the show is half over. That way we never catch up to the point where we are stuck watching commercials.
Show of hands - who remembers getting the print weekly TV Guide in the Sunday paper? Or the daily listings?
Add that to the list of things to make me feel antiquated! 
I usually screen an episode of a series to see if it both holds my interest and if it might appeal to my wife. I might check Rotten Tomatoes, but not usually. I’ve picked a couple of clinkers (like Hope Street), but have had pretty good luck with it.
Back in the days of VCRs (work with me here), one could buy a VCR & then set it to record a show & then FF thru the commercials. Your only cost was one-time cost of the VCR (& then any additional memory, ie. more VCR tapes).
AFAIK, any DVR these days either comes with your cable box or there was a company selling stand-alone DVRs but you had to have a subscription to use it. It wasn’t just the cost of the hardware. Given how few shows I want to record a year, that subscription price was astronomical per show (a $30/month subscription is $360/year; recording 3-4 shows, makes it in the neighborhood of $100/recording; that’s insanely expensive). Does anyone make one that I can buy the hardware but not need to pay a subscription to use it?
Nitpick – TV Guide is technically a magazine, although the term is sometimes also used generically. But yes, I remember both the magazine and the newspaper listings. IIRC the newspaper program guide was in the Saturday paper around here, and was in the form of a small booklet with all the programs for the week.
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When my TiVo died a little over a year ago, I did some research in case it turned out that I couldn’t live without a DVR: the Tablo reviews back then weren’t sparkling, but it did have some fans.
This is an example of technology regressing and becoming enshittified. Back in the days when everyone and his dog had a VCR, taping a program either manually or via timer was something that anyone could do without having to buy special hardware. Most people already had a VCR so they could rent movies, which incidentally were generally a lot cheaper to rent than today’s online digital rentals. Granted it was not high-definition, and in fact only about half the vertical resolution of broadcast SD.
Not really when you adjust for inflation. After an initial rental fee of $19.95 for a really popular release mere weeks* after it opens in theaters, the price almost always drops to $5.95 within a month which is on par with what we paid at a video store. And no special equipment required unless you are talking about Internet service.
*VHS releases could take up to a year after the theater release.
That’s a valid point. I was surprised at the high cost of some digital rentals, but they were very recent releases.
Incidentally, I still remember the very early days when movies first starting coming out on VHS and Betamax cassettes, circa 1977-78. The movie industry was still trying to figure out a price structure for the new media, and while I don’t remember what rentals cost then, if you wanted to buy a movie outright the cost was on the order of about $100, which would be nearly $500 in today’s dollars!