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).
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Article comments
1 - Nicolette Rivers
I can't even begin to describe my adoration of this smart, funny, meant-to-be-iconic show.
Rent it, buy it, borrow it from someone -- just watch it!
And it doesn't matter if you're into sci-fi as long as you're into well-written.
2 - David M. Brown
Rivers/River. Hmm....
"Firefly" is sort of the anti-"Star Trek." Much as I intermittently like "Trek," they sure can gunk up the warp engines with the pieties and techno-folderol. The next time the holodeck characters take over the ship we really should unplug the thing. "Firefly," by contrast, is just pure get-it-right in every scene. And when a bad guy deserves to be blown away, he's just blown away. There isn't a huge debate about it in the We've-Got-A-Situation Room.