tv

[susandennis]

When I was young, we had 3 networks on TV - ABC, NBC and CBS. Programming started in the morning with news. The Today Show was an hour. The evening news was local from 5-5:30 and national from 5:30-6. I was not allowed to watch TV on school nights. The only exception to this was Sunday nights. We were allowed to watch The Wonderful World of Disney and then Bonanza.

I thought the weeknight TV ban was really cruel. I never got to see Gunsmoke and could never join in the conversation at school about Miss Kitty's new dress. Once I got out from under, I watched TV whenever I wanted. Which was a lot.

Then, in 1980, I got a VCR and my TV life was born anew. Some shows I watched all winter and then watched again over the Summer. There were many years when episodic TV just reran the whole season over the summer. I was always delighted when the new season started in the fall and always crushed when it ended in the spring.

Until this year. I realized this weekend, that I'm really ready for this seasons' shows to be over. They will be next week but this week would have been better. I have also quit watching many of them altogether. I totally abandoned all NCIS's. And This is Us. And Suits. And most of the new stuff that just started. I'm saving the Red Line til all the episodes are recorded. For The People, which started last year and I really enjoyed, got canceled.

It all used to matter to me way more than it does now. I still enjoy TV but now I'm much more into Acorn.TV and Amazon Prime and, to a lesser degree, Netflix. (The Acorn app is the best. Then Amazon. Netflix drives me nuts with it's autoplay-that-cannot-be-stopped.) I will buy a month of CBS All Active to get the latest season of The Good Fight.

This morning I learned that Spotify and Hulu got married. You can now add Hulu to your Spotify account (for a limited time, I think) for free. So I will no longer have to pay $1 a month for Hulu - ha! The savings!! I rarely watch anything on Hulu anyway but it's the principle.

It's still killing me how much I'm having to pay to watch baseball on TV. So much so that I'm seriously considering abandoning it and just listening to it on radio. This week, the idiot who usually does the radio broadcast will be switching to Mariners TV so I think I'm going to try an experiment. I think I'm going to spend this week as if I did not have any access to baseball on TV. I need to really understand how painful it would be to just have it on radio.

In other news, I was cleaning up the kitchen yesterday and found two baking potatoes that never got baked and were getting a little mature... So I plucked off the growing eyes and cubed them and turned them into potato salad which turned out to be excellent. And I have some left over.

It's blessedly cooler today and even cloudy. Way nicer. I haven't decided if I'm going out anywhere today. I need Costco bacon but not critically. I may just stay here and sew or whatever. I do need to finish up my library book. It expires on Wednesday but I also have a new one that downloaded and I need to get on it.

But, first, I should get dressed.

Comments

[jocosa]

For the people got cancelled?? Argh!! Just started watching this season and I really love it. I hate all the breaks shows take now. I too recall when shows ran from summers end, to summers beginning. Then 3 months of reruns. At least this is the last week of the teachers tournament, then our champ is back!

[susandennis]

then our champ is back!

YES! Butt... I was reminded yesterday that Jeopardy will be going on Summer break but I think it might not be until July... I'm ready for some more James for sure.

[zoefruitcake.livejournal.com]

I used to obsessively watch TV but if it stopped tomorrow I wouldn't be gutted

[susandennis]

Oh I think I'd be majorly bummed with no TV at all. But, it interesting to me how my TV habits and tastes have changed so drastically.

[river57.livejournal.com]

I'm so old I remember when tv went off in the afternoon (at least in the Philadelphia market) from about 1 til 4.

[susandennis]

In Missouri, we had no tv at all until 3 pm - test pattern. Which I think I watched every afternoon from 2:30 until 3 when Pinky Lee came on. We moved to North Carolina in 1955 and they had morning TV there. But, nothing after that until 4 but I was over Pinky Lee by then :)

[susandennis]

Time to move on with our tv lives!

[lacachet.livejournal.com]

Is it Aaron that you don't like? Just wondering why, no judgement--

[susandennis]

Yes, yes. I didn't mean to be obscure. But Aaron drives me crazy. I know he's angling for a better job in a bigger market and I sure wish he'd get one soon.

[mrdreamjeans.livejournal.com]

The only one of the new series I really enjoyed was FBI. Sela Ward always brings such intelligence to every role. My favorite older series is McGyver, the three year old reboot.

[ringsandcoffee.livejournal.com]

I remember only having as many channels as were on the round dial on the TV. Sometime in the early to mid-80s, we got cable out of necessity - we had moved next to hills that blocked antenna reception. The box had a slider to change channels, all 30 of them. Well, the some of those might have been pay channels. We also rented VCRs for special occasions before buying one.

[susandennis]

I'd forgotten about those slider cable boxes. Wild.

[legalmoose]

You can disable the auto-play feature on Netflix. On their web site, click the little icon in the top right corner, go to Account, then scroll down to Playback Settings under My Profile (last set of options), then uncheck "Play next episode automatically."

I do that occasionally to the account when my husband is driving me nuts with autoplaying videos that keep going well after he's fallen asleep. ;)

[susandennis]

interesting. i can't get that to work. it's unchecked but still the damn things scream at me. i have gotten so that i remember to hit mute before i bring up the app.

[legalmoose]

I think I ended up resetting whichever Netflix app I was using to get it to kick in, but YMMV. Maybe click, reset, unblock, reset?

[rsc.livejournal.com]

I don't know why "Suits" is still on. Or why we still watch it. But it is, and we do.

In an unusual lapse, when jwg set up to record the first episode of "The Red Line" he neglected to get a Season Pass, which we only discovered last night, when we actually got around to watching the first one. So we didn't record it on either the 5th or the 12th. If we'd been lucky, we would have hated it, but we didn't, so we need to see the missing episodes. It looks like we can get them off some streaming service(s), don't know how much we're going to have to pay.

My family didn't have a rule against weeknight TV, so we got to watch "Gunsmoke", not to mention "Have Gun Will Travel" and "Maverick" -- I guess there were lot of Westerns on in those days, plus sitcoms such as "Our Miss Brooks", "My Friend Irma", "The Honeymooners", etc... Now I think of it, we must have watched almost as much TV then as we do now.

[susandennis]

There were tons of westerns on TV back then. So weird. And dogs - Lassie, Rin Tin Tin. I loved Our Miss Brooks. I cannot read the words Have Gun Will Travel without hearing the song.