Television

I've always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the telly.  Love, because....seriously....there's been some amazing things that I'd never seen if I didn't have this wonderful black box in my house.  And hate...because 99% of what comes on it is complete crap just churned out to fill airtime or sell the sponsor's product.

Despite the amount of crap out there I still think we're in a bit of a golden age right now as far as what we can watch on TV as long as you're willing to disconnect the cable box and hook up the interwebs.


With typical canadian cable you get.....actually...I'm not really sure.  I stopped watching years ago... except for "important" sports and a few oddities that I like that actually show up here. From my journeys into the real world I gather it's mostly a mixture of talent shows, dubious-talent shows (ventriloquists....my mom fucking loves ventriloquists) , tampon commercials, imitations of CSI, and some canadian content about muslims living in small-town saskatchewan (although I hear this series is over...which is the easiest way to know it's not american...more on that later).


So if you don't watch cable....what do you do?

Torrents baby.

There's good shows being made out there in the world.....but they just don't seem to ever actually get shown on our tv's here.  Sometimes a series has already been over and done for a couple years before you hear about it....but that's no reason to watch Jersey Shore instead.  But...but....you don't want to be left out of conversations at work about it.....um....all you need to know is it's something about new jersey....all the people in it are douchbags....something called a snooky happens....and everyone who watches claims to be embarrased by that fact but still watches anyway.   Boom.  You're all caught up. 


So how do you find shows.  Well...the best/easiest place to start is england.  It's hard to believe but they do watch tv there....and it's really fricken good.  One of the best parts about it is that when a show is over...it's over.




There's no dragging it out for 7 years just because it was a hot ticket for 4 and you wanted to guarantee ad revenue so you committed to 3 more even though you're completely out of ideas and all your main actors have moved on to other things.  British shows (the good ones at least) tend to have a pre-defined plot outline...they run through it and then boom...they wrap it up.  It's like a movie told 25 minutes at a time at weekly intervals. 

Oh and forget the american 26 show "season".....generally each "series" of UK shows are 6 or maybe if it's a really big one 12-13 episodes.  You can wrap up a 3 year english show in 18 episodes....maybe 20 if it's huge and their fans badger them into a Christmas special....and it's done.  Nice little package.  No filler.  No on-again-off-again-on-again love stories that drag out for 3 years. 

or

Ok...not the best comparo.....since the US Office was a pretty good show on it's own once it stopped trying to be the UK one.  ...  but you get my point.