I don't have cable. That's probably a good thing. Channel surfing so many channels all the time can be distracting, even when "nothing's on." The plethora of talking heads and footer crawls can be ulcer-inducing. Plus: maybe there's life outside the TV box?

You miss some good stuff that way, though. There must be an episode of Dallas I haven't seen that is airing, right now, on some country-music-and-crafts channel I would never otherwise sit still for. I have vague memories of Bill Bixby's The Magician that need refreshing. And there are the new shows you hear glowing things about that you don't get to see until...well, until not very long after a season wraps up, when the DVD comes out. Hence I am already privy to season one of Battlestar Galactica, and can express annoyance that it took so long for Netflix to make season two available I-don't-know-how-many-days after Amazon was already selling it. (And now Netflix reports a "long wait" for the first disk of the season...huh? Like they didn't know there would be high demand...I...I...okay, it's just a minor delay in the watching of the first disk, but...)

I finally hooked the Netflix IV into my arm a couple of months ago, then decided the other day--on Jan. 10, 2006, if you must know, or maybe it was Jan. 9, what, am I on trial here?--to condescend to once again drop by the little non-Blockbuster video shop I had once patronized, only to find that it has shut its doors. The current owner had taken over about a year ago. Apparently I was the one customer they couldn't do without. No, not really. It had been lurching toward its doom anyway. I predicted it. "If this store doesn't do anything to improve things, it will close. It is lurching toward its doom. I predict it." The shop lapsed into oblivion not because of Blockbuster and Netflix but because management did nothing to increase foot traffic despite the looming shadow of BlocNet (except reduce the store's hours as a "cost-saving measure" and thus make it even harder to drop by; no, it does not make sense to open for business at 4:30 in the afternoon).

But this is not about you, Too Stupid to Live Video Magic, it's about Firefly, which aired for less than one season on Fox a few years back before being idiotically yanked from the lineup. The affair didn't register a blip with me at the time. But bitstreams of hosannas gradually coalesced and trained themselves in my direction, and eventually I took notice. I succumbed to the rhapsodies socking me and went to see the 2005 movie in the theater that somehow got made on the strength of a show cancelled even before all of its first-season episodes could be aired. Then I signed up for Netflix, saw all the episodes of the show on DVD, and am planning to see the movie again on DVD.

Now, I'm sure that whether any particular viewer cottons to Firefly is a matter of taste, but, for the thing of its kind it is (boffo smart-ass SF western caper), it could not have been done better. Fox execs could have seen what they had merely by watching an episode, and given it a little time to find its market. They should have tried to--ah, but it's too late now. What's done is done.