It’s another hot and muggy June night, and I’ve been working all day, dealing with what I’ll politely call “the public.” I get home, thumb through my mail, and discard the three no interest for six months credit card offers and the 75% discount magazine subscriptions, save the various bills, filing them in my mental rolodex with the idea
I’ll pay them immediately, knowing I’ll wait for the “friendly reminder”, at which point I’ll overpay 20 cents, just to screw up their automated bookkeeping. After all, the most miniscule protests are the ones that fuel revolutions.

Anyway, it’s been a rough day, and all I want to do is kick back with a glass of red wine and the soothing tones of the television. Don’t misunderstand—I don’t want to be sedated by “unscripted” shows that feign reality by placing misfits together in a controlled environment, or so-called game shows that offer the promise of millions if the contestants make a lucky guess, or even formulaic sitcoms still retreading premises that were already shopworn by the early seventies. Even the news programs seem like they’re in reruns.

No—I need something else on nights like these, something to remind why I loved TV in the first place, why I rushed home from college classes so as not to miss the early anime Starblazers {known in Japan as Spaceship Yakamoto), why I fortified myself with copious amounts of caffeine to see those episodes of The Prisoner (which never seemed to air before 3AM), why I left work early to make sure I didn’t miss an episode of 24, why I shuffled my schedule to recap Dexter.

Nights like these also remind me why broadband Internet is a wonderful invention (does anybody even remember dial-up?), and why I watch more and more TV on my computer. It’s not that it’s edging out TV As We Know It, but it is adding much-needed flavor to a broadcast soup that’s gone stale. Go to any of the Big Four’s websites—CBS, NBC, ABC, or FOX—and the homepage is decidedly more splashy than it was this time last year. They offer full episodes of their more popular series (as well as their struggling ones), and pepper their site with trivia, games and sundry items to entice viewers to watch their network, which, after all, is the most cutting edge of the four.

What it really means, though, is the Internet is making the traditional networks increasingly uncomfortable. As much as they like to say New Media is an unknown commodity (which was a large basis for the Writers’ Strike), they’re furiously circling their wagons for the invasion of a new way of watching TV. That new way is still climbing out of the primordial ooze, but it’s already evolved legs. And it’s learning, adapting the better TV of the past as it learns, inexorably carving a niche for itself in the evolutionary food chain. YouTube was arguably the first Internet network to capitalize on the cyberspace factor, and it remains entrenched in the Zeitgeist as the eminent force of New Media.