Quote:
I have no qualms about stating they were the best three shows of the past 5 years.


Hmmm... has it really been five years since "Firefly"?

I didn't particularly care for any of the three shows you mentioned, but that's just me. They were probably good shows, just not to my taste.

As long as we're talking about TV pet peeves... how about the practice some of the networks are doing now of starting certain programs a minute before the hour (i.e, 8:59 pm instead of 9:00 pm)? That means that if you watch TV using a PVR like TiVo, the 8:59pm show is competing against TWO hours of programming (the 8p-9p shows, and the 9p-10p shows) which cuts the likelihood in half of the show being recorded. In my case, it cuts the likelihood to zero because any such show I find I immediately delete the season pass and that's the end of it.

The commercial networks are shooting themselves in the foot, taking short term gains at the expense of long-term prosperity. Remember that the networks are not in the business of providing quality programming, they are in the business of providing viewers to their advertisers, and if more people want to watch fifth graders than want to watch some family named Donnelly, then it's the fifth graders that prevail.

I think commercial television may be on its death bed now. I had the unfortunate experience of trying to watch a movie on my TV a few weeks ago (as opposed to watching it on TiVo) because I have only a single-tuner TiVo and it was busy recording something else. The movie was completely unwatchable. The run time of the movie, if you were to watch it on DVD, was 110 minutes. After the network finished the butchery ("...edited for content and to run in the time allotted") there was probably only about 90 minutes of programming. The actual on-air time for the movie was three hours. Every ten minutes (at hh:10, hh:20, hh:30 etc.) there was a commercial break that ran a minimum of 4:30, sometimes as long as 6:00. I believe there was more commercial matter than programming during the three hours. It was the first time in years that I had ever watched live TV. I won't do it again.

tanstaafl.
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"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"