Why I Sit at Home and Watch TV on Friday Nights
I don’t have cable TV or a DVR right now. I canceled my Comcast service last fall when I completed a year at a promotional price for TV and Internet and they doubled my monthly rate to the “regular price”. Instead, I have a good old-fashioned antenna hooked up to my HDTV, and as long as it’s balanced just right on top of my shelf, it gives me fantastic picture for primetime high-def programming. The Super Bowl was stunning. Jack Bauer’s wacky Monday night adventures come in crystal-clear.
Still, without a DVR, I refuse to re-organize my life around programming schedules. Hulu takes care of a lot of time-shifting for me, but for the past two Friday nights, I’ve sat at home and watched my new favorite block of geeky TV.
On a night when most people go out, I’m at home with a big stupid geek grin on my face. I starts at 8:00 pm with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I don’t care that it has a much slower pace than the movies, or that we haven’t seen a really good terminator fight in months. I can even forgive the shameless and blatant product placement. This season has been a lot of set-up, and I’m dying to see how the knock it all down for the remainder of this year’s episodes.
At 9:00 it’s time for Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse. Whedon is one of my all-time favorite writers, and not just on TV. He can put together the kind of story that is packed with action, yet still has a lot of thematic undercurrents, but he doesn’t beat you over the head with them. It premiered just two weeks ago, so if you haven’t watched, I strongly, strongly recommend you check out the first two episodes over on Hulu. Just like with Whedon’s past projects, he’s weaving a long story arc, and I can’t wait to see where it goes. I embedded the pilot episode at the top of this post to make it super-easy for you to check out.
At 10:00 I have to shut off Twitter because the rest of the world is watching Battlestar Galactica. If you’ve never seen it, start at the beginning. Don’t start now. Too much has happened, and there are only four episodes left. This has been the absolutely most compelling television in the past four years, with maybe the exception of The Wire.
Because I don’t have cable, I can’t get Sci Fi and watch live. I step away from Twitter to insulate myself from spoilers. (People in the Twitterverse love to post spoilers, I learned the hard way.) But Sci Fi drops the ball here. New episodes aren’t available until eight days after their broadcast. Eight! I’m sure it’s a ploy to get those of us without cable to head over to iTunes and shell out a few bucks, and I’m sure that it works.
For two hours, Friday nights are my geek-out nights. If you haven’t checked out Dollhouse, you should give it a try and, if you like it, you should join me while I immerse myself in a world of killer robots from the future, high-tech personality imprints, explosions, femmes fatales, and science projects gone awry. I’ll be on Twitter.
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