This is what's wrong with TV
by
Unhappy Kid - (Source: Flickr)Friend-of-the-blog Morjana Coffman did me a favor yesterday for which I'm really grateful. She gave me the upcoming broadcast schedule for Lost reruns on Scifi which in turn gave me yet another thing to complain about when it comes to network TV (which includes cable, as opposed to broadcast TV): schedule juggling.
It's happened to all of us: from 10PM to 8PM, from Wednesdays to Thursdays and then back again, and I'm sick of it.
The Scifi Channel committed an unforgivable sin (amongst many others) when they moved Lost reruns from 7-10PM on Monday evenings to the afternoon without sufficient warning. I didn't see much of Lost the first time around so being able to watch it in order this way has been great for me and my father. We skip commercials because commercials are evil so if they made an announcement about it then, I didn't see it. I know for a fact they didn't use the quarter-screen adverts that cover the bottom of the screen when the show comes back from commercial to announce the time slot change, and while I'd love to go on about that little sin, it's not nearly as bad as what I'm crying about right now.
I missed three episodes of a show that you can't miss even a single episode of -- so goes life with a serial drama -- and now have been forced to download them illegally, and I really don't feel very good about that.
Moving it to the afternoon helps alleviate an overcrowded Monday evening and I was happy about that aspect of it at first, but now I see quite plainly that it's only being moved during Christmas and New Years and will end up back in the evening slot in January. As if moving it twice weren't bad enough, some nights will have up to six episodes airing while others will only have four.
My DVR is a godsend but even it is not a god itself, so now keeping up with this show is going to be a nightmare of sorts and there's simply no good reason for it. It's almost as if Scifi is trying to make me stop watching the show for some reason, and honestly if these games don't stop, I'm going to carry through on my threat from this morning and just stop watching it altogether.
Netflix allows you to rent an entire season box set and right now that's looking like a hell of a lot better option than the bullshit Scifi is pulling right now.
This is endemic of what is wrong with network television. I really don't care why they do things like this because it's not my job to care and it's not fascinating or interesting to me in the least. I just want it to stop, or I'm going to stop watching and network TV is going to keep losing viewers and it'll be their own fault.
DVRs are suposed to allow people to catch new shows they wouldn't otherwise have time to see, and yet even in this day and age, networks like Scifi are making it harder, not easier, just to catch the old shows, but the new ones?
Forget about it.
I have a DVR folks and I'm now three episodes behind on Lost reruns because of this crap, and if it gets that bad, how can these companies ever expect to stay in business or expect people to stop pirating shows just so they can see them in the first place?
December 23, 2008 3:22 AM | Reply
Perhaps that was one of the (many, many) reasons I loved Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis so much. Both shows, even SG1 when it was on Showtime, have been on Friday since SG1 premiered back in '97.
Different times (either 9 or 10pm), but it's always been a Friday.
I sure hope Stargate: Universe will be scheduled for Friday!
:)