TV In The Greater Scheme Of Things

After my stay in the hospital, I somehow lost interest in watching TV, and by TV, I mean the programming offered by the major networks.

I’m not exactly sure what brought this change about. Maybe it was the fact that watching TV shows on my Ipad, which was preferable to the crappy little TVs in the hospital where I was unable to fast forward through the commercials.

When I got home, my wife offered to have one of our large screen TVs moved to my room. But by this time, I was already too far gone in my TV cleanse to really need that. I was perfectly happy to watch streaming series on my Ipad, where I could also watch archived TV shows. Turned out the only show I was interested in watching was Bluebloods, which I always thought with a pretty decent drama.

After I started writing again, I began to think about my experience with TV over the years. And as I did I discovered that my interest had actually started to wane around the time I realized I could download or ‘pirate’ shows that were streaming just about everywhere. My son, who was heavy into this at the time, (not anymore) taught me the ins and outs and soon we were watching all kinds of stuff that our cable TV did not have access too.

This was in the early days of streaming and the renegade Pirate Bay was our downloading channel of choice. Of course, when the streaming channels actually started to bulk up to fight this, we were already subscribed to three or four of them, and have given more than our share of money back to the process.

A few months ago, we had a family meeting (Heather & I)  and decided to shrink down to basic cable, which was all the networks and a few other things. We only did that in order for Heather to keep her phone as part of a package deal.

We have been off the deluxe cable package for the past month and what do you know, no withdrawal symptoms at all.

For the last week, Heather decided to watch the network news every night, and found that even that was hard to take because of the negativity and the commercials. I think we have both decided it's less stressful to get the news in dribs and drabs on the Internet as opposed to tuning in and getting large depressing doses every night.

So here we are a couple of streamers. We have Netflix, Prime, Disney, Crave and Acorn (a British channel), as well as basic cable. And it’s actually cheaper than the deluxe cable package we had. Heather was lamenting that she would miss all the Hallmark movies. But I told her that they would almost all be available on the TV networks one way or another.

So in the greater scheme of things, we have come out way ahead.

We have access to an endless stream of high quality programming, docs and movies and no longer have to pirate anything. The only thing I don’t really have is access to the sports channels, but honestly, the networks do a pretty good job of covering off all the playoffs in just about every sport I used to follow.

I’m not sure about the future of Network TV. Right now, looking at the schedules, it appears to be pretty much reality shows, which is a real indicator that their revenues ain’t what they used to be. The handful of shows that are left are perennial favourites, mostly about crime and punishment in its various forms.

Could just be that some of these networks will disappear altogether. Or simply become commercial laden versions of the streaming networks. Who knows for sure. Most of what is on network TV besides news shows are basically pablum for the masses and filler for commercials, which I consider most reality shows to be. It’s still viable as an advertising medium. In fact, it’s still the most powerful of them all. How long it will remain so is anybody’s guess.

But one thing is for sure, the more discerning TV viewers, which really translates into the higher end of the consumer market, have mostly all moved on and would much rather binge on something great like Billions or Yellowstone, or any of the dozens of great series out there, than yawn their way through yet another season of NCIS or Dancing with the Stars. Eeek!