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.
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.
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,
DVR at 3%
Huge pile of DVDS
Baseball and Nascar
Footballs coming…
I’ve got issues!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Right, this, exactly.
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]