What to Watch?

    

Times change. 

Technology changes.

People adapt at varying degrees.  When an increase in convenience is involved, we tend to adapt to change quickly and rarely look back.  Sometimes, technology provides more options and actually complicates things.

I remember when we got our first television.  I loved it immediately.  Black and white on a ridiculously small screen as it was, it brought stories to life. Be it drama, comedy, or documentaries, I was enthralled.  I loved the children’s shows of the era, Captain Kangaroo, Romper Room, Tom Terrific, and the local shows featuring Soupy Sales, Jingles, Captain Jolly, and Johnny Ginger.  I liked a show called Sky King.  I thought The Three Stooges were awesome and I still do ‘til this day.

Back in the day, there were three channels to choose from:  the ABC, CBS, and NBC local affiliates.  In Detroit where I grew up, we also had access to CKLW the Windsor affiliate of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  It was a simpler time.  Choosing what to watch was simple.  At any given time, there was a choice of four things to watch.  The schedule was generally fixed and varied only in the event of a monumental breaking news story in which case the three American channels aired the same thing.

Choosing what to watch was easy.  You could consult the handy weekly publication, TV Guide, and tune-in.  If you misplaced the TV Guide and hadn’t memorized the schedule which rarely changed, you surf in that pre-remote way.  You walked over to the TV set, and cycled through the channels and picked whatever caught your fancy.

Into the 1960s, the number of stations began to multiply.  Originally TVs operated in what they called Very High Frequency (VHF).  Some of the expansion was on VHF but the bulk was on Ultra High Frequency (UHF) which all TVs did not receive.  To get UHF, we had to get an add-on box, a precursor of things to come.

The number of channels available exploded with the advent of cable.  Cable had been around since almost the beginning of television.   In 1949, due to poor reception issues rural areas of Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Arkansas, the first cable transmission of television was pioneered to solve the problem.  I never would have guessed cable television began that long ago.

Cable exploded in the 1970s and 1980s.  It was triggered by HBO which began in 1972 and accelerated by ESPN in 1979, and then CNN in 1980.  By 1990, there were hundreds of channels.  Channel surfing became a male couch potato sport.  As Seinfeld said in his eponymic TV show, “Men don't care what's on TV. They only care what else is on TV.”

Video on Demand began in the 1990s but really took off in when Netflix began their online streamline service in 2007.  These days, we are able to watch almost anything we want at any given time.  I certainly get the concept and actually thought I would take great advantage of it.  That has not been the case.  The long and short of it is that I can almost never decide what to watch when virtually everything is available.  There are simply too many choices.   When I feel like watching a movie, it is very rare that I have a particular movie in mind; less than 1% of the time.  When I then try to think of one, my mind is a blank. 

I have several streaming services available to me such as Netflix, Peacock, Tubi, Pluto, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, and Xfinity.  I can certainly browse the libraries of each for movies, series, and documentaries.  I have indeed tried to do that.  Again, it is overwhelming.  It shouldn’t be but for some reason it is.  This is exactly what happened when I used to go to video rental stores (remember those?).  Unless I had an actual movie in mind, it took me forever to make a selection. 

So, I resort to seeing what is actually “on.”  I flip through the channels until I see something of interest.  The only choice then is do I watch the movie in progress or restart it?  This seems to work for me, as low tech and old school as that sounds.

In recent years, there are series produced by these and other streaming networks or services.  They are very popular folks tend to binge watch them (though the buzz on binge watching seems way down from my perspective).  We tried that and watched a few of these.  Frankly, they were too long.  None of the episodes came to any real closure but more so left things unresolved enough so people would watch the next episode.  This is the motivation for binge watching. 

Luckily, E! is showing all the Harry Potter movies over and over again.  As I am a huge fan, there is always something “on” this weekend.