# How do you "triage" your premium TV? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 27, 2015, 10:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636 "2015-04-27T10:37:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![zombywoof](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/9e8a1a/32.png) [@zombywoof](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zombywoof)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2015, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/21 "2015-04-28T00:50:05Z")
> [@Spud](#): > > Don’t have HBO, not following Game of Thrones although I think I might like it. Sunday is when HBO airs some of their other major shows (Veep, Silicon Valley, and John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight) as well…it’s been their big night for a while now (The Sopranos, Sex & The City, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Curb Your Enthusiasm, etc.) and other networks have followed suit. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2015, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/22 "2015-04-28T00:58:22Z")
HBO didn’t originate Sunday nights as the night for big-time prestige programs. If you read the articles I linked to, you’ll see that “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, “Bonanza” and “60 Minutes” all aired on Sunday nights and that it’s the night when more people watch TV than any other night. ---
**Author:** ![zombywoof](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/9e8a1a/32.png) [@zombywoof](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zombywoof)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2015, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/23 "2015-04-28T01:07:07Z")
If we’re talking about scheduling of current “premium TV”, I think the success of The Sopranos is a more relevant factor than when Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Bonanza happened to air 50 or 60 years ago…as one of the article you linked to explicitly says, > [@](#): > > In each generation, hit shows of every stripe have made their home on Sunday…that attractive glow had dimmed by the late 1990s, when HBO was looking for a time slot to introduce its new crime-drama series “The Sopranos"…“We looked around and said, ‘What is the least competitive night?’ ” recalled Michael Lombardo, a longtime HBO executive who is now its president of programming. “Sunday wasn’t a competitive night for the networks, so we said, ‘O.K., this is where we’ll start.’ What has followed in the 15 years after “The Sopranos” made its debut is an explosion of serialized Sunday night television on broadcast and cable networks. ” ---
**Author:** ![GoodOldKJ](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bc79bd/32.png) [@GoodOldKJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GoodOldKJ)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2015, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/24 "2015-04-28T04:05:06Z")
DVR at 3% Huge pile of DVDS Baseball and Nascar Footballs coming… I’ve got issues! ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2015, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/25 "2015-04-28T13:49:11Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > 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. Just how much TV do you plan to watch anyway? If you watch one hour of TV a night, that’s 365 hours a year, which would be sixteen 22-episode seasons of any given show, or 8 seasons of 2 shows, etc… Even if you halve that, you still have a LOT of room to watch TV. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2015, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/26 "2015-04-28T22:20:48Z")
Yet as I noted, I find I can hardly make a dent in all those shows I listed in my OP that I am behind on, just from keeping up with the shows I am current on which I didn’t list before but probably should to answer your question: _SNL, Survivor_ (two seasons per year), _Better Call Saul, The Americans, Real Time with Bill Maher, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Meet the Press, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Rectify, Mozart in the Jungle, transparent, Last Man on Earth, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Review, Inside Amy Schumer, Community, Rick and Morty, OITNB, High Maintenance, and Black Mirror._ I also watch several hours a day of tennis during Grand Slam events (so, eight weeks a year), and several hours per week of NFL during the football season. I used to watch a fair bit of basketball and college football, as well as non-Slam tennis tournaments, but all that’s gone by the wayside. And there are new Netflix shows I’ve been meaning to try but haven’t gotten to yet: _Daredevil, Bloodline, Maron, Legit_, and _Bojack Horseman._ The mention of “Bojack” reminds me that in a perfect world I’d also keep up with _South Park_, _Family Guy_, and _The Simpsons_, but I’ve just completely given up on those. Same for _Arrow_, which I hear got really good in season two. ETA: I also get a couple Blu-rays a week from Netflix, and try to make time to watch movies streaming there and on Amazon as well. ---
**Author:** ![Reluctant\_A](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/839c29/32.png) [@Reluctant\_A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reluctant_A)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2015, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/27 "2015-04-29T00:49:07Z")
Without subjecting myself to more criticism of my tastes in TV than I have to, I triage thusly: [ol] [li]Events that are not available in replay, such as sports (which, to me, basically means basketball).[/li][li]Events that are not available on demand, or from the broadcaster’s website (my provider, for example, does not make any CBS content available on demand).[/li][li]Events that are available on demand, but which do not permit fast forwarding.[/li][li]Events that are only broadcast during one timeslot per week.[/li][li]Everything else.[/li][/ol] In practice, there aren’t all that many occasions when there are two things I watch being broadcast simultaneously and, when it does happen, it is usually an occurrence of my first triage rule. ---
**Author:** ![Freudian\_Slit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@Freudian\_Slit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freudian_Slit)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2015, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/28 "2015-04-29T14:26:33Z")
I don’t have quite a system worked out yet, but it helps to have someone you trust who recommends a show. I remember last year a coworker loved Louie, so I finally watched it on a whim and ended up loving it. She also loved Orange Is the New Black, so I started watching that next–adored it. And next came Serial (not a TV show, but you get the idea). ---
**Author:** ![EllisDee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellisdee/32/4531_2.png) [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2015, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/29 "2015-04-30T21:30:26Z")
For me, the biggest loss with all the new good tv content is movies. Four years ago I would watch hundreds of movies per year, catching most independent films and all the big names. Now I’m lucky to see two movies per week thanks to always fighting the backlog of tv on my DVR. With my terabyte DVR extender I can hold a ridiculous amount of HD video; currently it’s in the mid-60s percentage used, with probably 130 movies and maybe a dozen tv shows. (Not all the movies are in HD, though. Stupid Sundance channel…) For tv I’m current on most of what I want to watch, maybe two weeks behind for the bubble shows. The problem for me is that I’m pretty sure my DVR auto-deletes stuff over a year old, and my DVR has a dozen or more movies from every month going back to last June. I’m hoping the good tv takes a breather over the summer so I can try to carve out a six month buffer on the movies, but earlier today I did a count and have something like 50 movies that were recorded more than six months ago. It will take me many months to get through 50 movies. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2015, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/30 "2015-04-30T23:13:43Z")
I too am a big movie buff, and have been finding that premium TV conflicts with that. Which I find frustrating, because every time I put off seeing movies to keep up with TV, a nagging voice in the back of my mind says “people worked for years to make this one 90 minute thing and it shouldn’t get back-burnered by content that for each separate show can involve dozens of hours of time commitment” (or even scores of hours, in the case of TV shows I am several seasons behind on). ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2015, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/31 "2015-05-01T00:39:37Z")
> [@RikWriter](#): > > 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. You have 30 hour days? Tell me how! Collecting the shows is not a problem. Finding time to watch shows and have a life is for me. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2015, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/32 "2015-05-01T00:47:03Z")
Those of us who grew up before VCRs, let along DVRs, maybe learned this early. If two things were on at the same time you made a choice and understood you’d never see the other one until summer reruns. Fewer choices, of course, but you still had to decide on something. And you can always catch up if you want to hard enough. When we finally decided to watch Mad Men we caught up from Netflix and then DVRed it. I guess I’ll catch up with Game of Thrones when I retire. But since Lost turned out to be a disappointment, I’ll probably never watch and have saved all that time. No premium channels for me, which cuts down the choices. BTW, we’ve found that we can follow the threads of a series far better watching it in chunks off streaming or DVDs instead of once a week in the traditional way. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2015, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/33 "2015-05-01T00:52:25Z")
Yes, Lost turned out to be a disappointment. But it’s fun to watch a show an episode a week and then to talk about it at work the next day, or to come here and participate in the threads each week. (For example, “Why is there a polar bear on what looks like a tropical island?” Or, “What the hell was that thing that just killed the pilot of the plane?”) That’s something you miss if you binge watch a show at your leisure. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2015, 5:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/34 "2015-05-01T05:58:36Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > You have 30 hour days? Tell me how! > Collecting the shows is not a problem. Finding time to watch shows and have a life is for me. Right, this, exactly. > [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > Yes, Lost turned out to be a disappointment. But it’s fun to watch a show an episode a week and then to talk about it at work the next day, or to come here and participate in the threads each week. (For example, “Why is there a polar bear on what looks like a tropical island?” Or, “What the hell was that thing that just killed the pilot of the plane?”) That’s something you miss if you binge watch a show at your leisure. Yeah, I do think the binge-watching era has made us lose something. It’s most noticeable with Netflix shows, that are released a season at a time. The opportunity for discussion really gets lost that way. ---
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2015, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636/35 "2015-05-01T14:51:42Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > …Yeah, I do think the binge-watching era has made us lose something. It’s most noticeable with Netflix shows, that are released a season at a time. The opportunity for discussion really gets lost that way. Yes, I’ve thought this too. The only “FOMO” I have is missing out on the next-day discussion. Otherwise you can always catch up. In the ancient days of the 1990s if I missed an episode of the X-Files and didn’t set my VCR to record it, I was out of luck unless I happened to catch a rerun of that episode months later. Now I can watch every episode on Netflix if and when I get around to it. But I got nobody to talk to about a particularly crazy episode, or the smoldering sexual tension building between Scully and Mulder. 😛 So something gained, something lost…[/wistfully philosophical] [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-triage-your-premium-tv/718636.md?page=1)