Aye, Aye, Aye

I love the smell of premieres in the evening!

Believe it or not, writing about television isn't my normal job. In the course of traveling, dealing with hotels with internet access that doesn't work or cost more to access a day than what I pay in a month, I am pitifully less punctual with posting my premiere previews.

Do you know what I'm doing right now? Watching my DVR, that's what I'm doing. I have 4 days to move out of my apartment and I'm curled up on my couch with an afghan, boxes and sundry strewn around me, catching up on all the shows I missed.

It's hard when you regularly watch television with someone. You have to save certain shows to watch with them. And if they read your blog (they do) and they find out what happens and realize that even though you said you only watched it with them, you weren't watching it for the first time. (Women! We're such liars!) Of course, the shows you regularly watch with others are the good ones, like The Office or Lost or Battlestar Galactica (yes, big fat tv nerd right here) so you're left with the shows that have been on for so long, even if they are good, they no longer warrant comment or procedurals that, even if you watch a different one on a different night and enjoy them, they're all really the same thing. This, however, is not my biggest problem.

My biggest problem is trying to figure out a way to watch every show I want to watch. If I add up the hours, watching television is a full time job. Too bad no one pays me to do so. It would be so gratifying if watching television and writing about it was my life, but, as I've already been told in comments, there are other much more qualified people writing about the same thing. Oh, my little television parlour tricks work on The Honey, who is a newbie television watcher, but they don't fool "others", who shall remain nameless... oh, wait... But I digress.

It gets very hard when you can't afford the million dollar Tivo that records every show in the world and makes you an espresso every morning, so you have to stick with the Cox (GLOOOOORIOUS) HD DVR which will get you two HD shows recording at the same time. But what happens when you have more than 2 shows that you want to watch in the same hour, like that hour when Reaper, House, and The Unit (or something like that) are all on... or Private Practice, Bionic Woman, and something else on the CW (Gossip Girl?) and you have to choose and you pick Bionic Woman because of Katee Sackhoff even though you've been an Addison Montgomery Shepherd fan from the beginning?

These are just scenarios (I haven't even checked to see if they actually are on at the same time) that happen to all of us tv addicts. We have to get creative because the DVR/Tivo will hold only so much. Fortunately for us, we can watch certain shows online, buy them on iTunes, and still have space for recording purposes. Not only are most of our favourite shows online, which would minimize the cost of buying from iTunes, but it also helps us stay honest when it comes to downloading shows. Of course, I'm not sure of the legality of downloading shows from torrent sites since they're on tv for free, but the increase in last season dvds for sell before or right at the current season makes it a grey area.

Next, we'll talk about exactly which shows should go where...