How do you "triage" your premium TV?

Cafe Society
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Emily Nussbaum coined (AFAIK) this way of looking at our current “Golden Age of TV” in a New Yorker piece:

This dovetails with #FOMO (fear of missing out). I can’t have any way of knowing for sure whether I’m missing some really great show. But I keep my ear to the pop culture ground and will generally try a few minutes, at least, of any new show that even some critics or fans whose opinions I trust recommend. So it’s doubtful there are many shows I’m truly missing out on, totally oblivious to, that I would be hugely into if I only knew about them.

My issue, like many people’s, is the “triage” aspect. There are just too many shows I’d like to watch and not enough time to watch them all and still lead a life (I have a wife and four kids, like to play tennis, and also enjoy reading both fiction and nonfiction). For that matter, the better a show is (at least for me), the more I want to read and comment about each episode, which then makes it even harder to find time.

This becomes all the more acute an issue when there is not only the firehose of new content but the opening up to the ability to see nearly everything from the past (I still have four seasons of The Wire as yet unwatched, four seasons of The Good Wife, five seasons of Justified, three of Friday Night Lights, almost all of *Buffy *and Mad Men; and I’m a season or two behind on Girls, Louie, Game of Thrones, The Leftovers, Silicon Valley, and The Walking Dead. (There are a number of other shows–my very favorites currently airing–which I am actually somehow current on, that I won’t list.)

What will it be like ten or twenty years hence, especially for newer generations that want to go back and see the best shows of the past? :eek:

I guess we all just have to get more and more brutal about cutting very good shows to make time for the great ones, or even cutting great ones for the sake of the transcendant masterpieces. It’s a “good problem to have”, but it sometimes doesn’t feel that way.

And what of the show that takes a while to find its groove, but ends up being one of the all-time-greats once it does? I fear none of us has the time and therefore the patience to play wait-and-see any more, which may mean potential Mt. Rushmore shows of the future get smothered in the cradle before they can realize that potential.

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And that’s a bad thing?

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If people talk about a show a lot here on the SDMB, I make a note to get around to watching it.

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This has been true of books for a long time. More are written per year than you could read in a life time. For all you know you’ll never read or even hear of your actual favorite book, especially if it’s one outside your preferred genre – wouldn’t even be on your radar. Whether a work becomes famous seems to be as much about quality as arbitrary luck of the zeitgeist. There’s an alternate universe where no one ever heard of Harry Potter, outside of the number of publishers that rejected it.

Ditto music.

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The abundance of stuff I want to watch is a problem. Among the worst, if not the worst, is Sunday evenings, 9pm in particular. And now there are so many other places aside from broadcast and cable channels that have great shows; Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo!, Acorn, etc. Some of these services are not free (usually about eight bucks a month). I don’t think anyone pays for all of them and pays for a premium cable subscription.

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Dropped my cable, never subscribed to any Premium channels, I have learned patience and no longer feel compelled to see something the same day it premieres. if it is a good show it can wait until I get around to it.

Apparantly I am immune to this new Fear Of Missing Out; I suspect it happened when I aged out of the target demographics for most sponsors.

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I record every show I watch from my subscribed cable channels and watch them at my convenience. It hasn’t really been that big of a deal.

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Personally I don’t pay attention to the “target demographics” when I find a show interesting and worth watching. I just watch the show, demographics be damned.

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All true!

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I only recognize a target demographic from the outside. When a TV show or movie gets a heavy word-of-mouth and I find I have no interest whatsoever in learning more about it then I recognize that I am not the audience they are aiming for.

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I don’t have a fear of “missing out” in that if a show doesn’t look interesting, I just don’t watch it.

But at the same time, this isn’t 1985 anymore. The options for watching shows that are on are more than ever before; I can stream them via several options, I can DVR 2 at the same time, and at least for cable shows, they typically replay the first-run episodes later that night or later in the week, so even if I miss it the first time around (eyeball or DVR), I can always catch it a little later. And that’s not even mentioning the endless replays of shows over time.

So the fact that I’ve never actually watched “Mad Men” doesn’t give me any heartburn; I can tape it whenever AMC plays it again (which they’ll eventually do), I could stream it from somewhere, or if nothing else, I could buy the DVDs.

In a way, my triage system is to try out shows I think I might be interested in first-run, and then catch the ones that I didn’t in replays. So for example, I never saw “Game of Thrones” in the first season- I watched it in replays just before the second season started because my brother and friends recommended it.

I think the real tragedy behind all this is that in some sense, the live or die aspect of a show comes down to what network they get played on, because a fair number of otherwise good shows still die on network TV, where their ratings and content might have got them a long happy run on cable (“Constantine”, I’m looking at you & NBC)

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Unless you have one of those DVRs that can record six shows at once, Sunday evenings can require some juggling. I’ll record the 9pm broadcasts of network shows that don’t get repeated later in the week, and then record the later rebroadcasts of shows on PBS, AMC, HBO or Showtime. And then it takes a couple of days before I get around to watching all of it. Sometimes I find that several episodes of a show sit on the DVR before I get around to watching them and then I often will stop recording and watching those shows. (For example, I used to watch Once Upon A Time and Revenge but they got too soapy.)

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I actually do feel #FOMO for some shows, but mostly because my online reading habits make it 99.9% certain that I’ll be spoiled on a zeitgeist show. I tend not to go super crazy about spoilers, per se, but it does sometimes diminish my desire to watch something - for instance, I know how “Lost” ends due to all the uproar about it at the time, and therefore I feel that’s part of the reason its sat completely unwatched in my Netflix queue.

Though I think this only applies for a handful of shows. Off hand, I think “Game of Thrones” and “Mad Men” are the current shows that may suffer from this.

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Sunday night means “Silicon Valley” gets DVRd. That’s it. I’m so far past #FOMO I’m approaching it from the other side. If I want to watch it later on, it will always be available to stream from some source. Besides, baseball takes priority anyway.

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I already pay too much for my very basic DirecTV package. I triage my premium channel shows by not ordering any premium channels. If this means that I don’t get to watch the shows, I guess that’s what it means. Somehow, I soldier on under the burden.

The Venture Bros.*, Archer, and The Big Bang Theory on my DVR are plenty of TV for me.

*Waiting patiently for the nest season of that, btw. And my patience is wearing thin.

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But see, for me that’s the problem. I am a “cord cutter” with no cable or satellite (and therefore no DVR), so scheduling isn’t the issue for me. It’s simply that there are more things I want to watch–more that I *can *watch thanks to my subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO Now, plus free Hulu–than I ever have time to actually get to.

And then I find myself not willing to completely cut shows out, so I spread myself thin and try to bounce around to all these different ones and get years behind on them and go weeks or months between episodes and forget what was going on by the time I get back to it.

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So what am I missing on Sundays? I don’t think we watch anything special that night. The night that Big Bang, Backstrom, and Elementary are on is our big night (Thursday I think).

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Depends on what you like and which channels you have access to. The Good Wife is on CBS. Sherlock and Downton Abbey run on PBS that evening. HBO has Game of Thrones on there now. Mad Men and Breaking Bad were on Sunday nights.

Sunday nights are when the networks air their prestige programs. See this article or this one.

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Didn’t catch The Good Wife although I’ve heard it is very good and will probably watch it in the off season. Sherlock isn’t airing new episodes now although that is one of my favorites. Not a fan of Downton Abby for some reason. Don’t have HBO, not following Game of Thrones although I think I might like it. Mad Men doesn’t really interest me and I wish Breaking Bad was still airing. Two of the shows mentioned I do watch… but they aren’t currently airing.

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There is an over the air DVR, I use mine quite a bit.
Netflix isn’t very good for movies, but it is much better for TV shows.
I wait for Game of Thrones to be on DVDS.

Brian