The TV Tyrant approaches the new year in a new way

December 29th, 2009 | by | boxee, hulu, time-shift

Dec
29

Anyone who follows this blog even ever-so-slightly has noticed an extreme drop-off in posts in recent months.

Part of the problem, I think, is that there has been so much excellent – or, at least fun – television (sandwiched between all the crap that’s out there) that I sometimes have been at a loss of what to write about. With too much to think about, I can have trouble, sometimes, deciding what to write about and what to let slip by.

But the new year approaches and with that, I have resolved to pay more attention to the shows that are worthy of deeper discussion. Some are, some aren’t.

My posts won’t necessarily always be the next day, however, as we made a major step in our household: We canceled our cable service.

So much of what we want is already online, via Hulu and other sources. We have a Boxee account and plan to get one of those boxes that lets us stream directly into our TV via Boxee, without having to hook up our laptop to the TV. We also got a Netflix account, finally (have meant to forever) and we already have Hex (a British sci-fi-ish series), United States of Tara and Veronica Mars in our queue.

The only thing that nearly made me cancel our cancellation is that I won’t be able to live-blog 24 with my buddies over at Blogs4Bauer, but I’m working on a solution to that. The same solution should aid in my ability to watch Supernatural in real-time. Need to set up the DVD-R, though, for those situations, as a backup.

I know ABC streams episodes of Lost the next morning, so that’s close enough for government work. Sci-Fi should stream Caprica as it did Battlestar Galactica. I should be able to watch Fringe on Hulu – we already were watching The Office and 30 Rock on Hulu, because Thursday’s were booked up with Flash Forward, Fringe, Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries. But I never really got hooked on Vampire Diaries, so maybe I’ll Netflix it sometime.

I know many people who’ve gone without “regular” TV for years now. I’ve extolled the virtues of time-shift viewing for years. I’ve now made the ultimate shift. Come along for the ride.

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Damages – It sucked me right back in …

May 26th, 2009 | by | damages

May
26

We never got around to watching Damages this year when it was actually on the air, but we dutifully recorded it to catch up with some time.

There, an entire season sat, taunting us.

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I remembered that last year, with Season 1, we knew, somehow, that we were going to like the show, but just couldn’t get ourselves to hit “play” on the first episode.

We’re not big on the procedural in our house. Only the star power of the cast – Glenn Close, Rose Byrne, Ted Danson – and the fact that it was on FX made us take a second look.

About five minutes into the first episode, we were completely hooked.

Oddly enough, the same thing happened this season.

It ended weeks ago – April 1 – and we hadn’t started watching it until over the Memorial Day weekend. We’d exhausted most of the other shows and movies on the DVR that we watch together.

So we finally caved in and started watching Season 2 of Damages.

About 5 minutes into it, we were completely sucked in.

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