The new DVR line-up

First of all, let me say how much I love my DVR. Having many years of working late shifts, I missed a lot of shows, and I can see now that often the shows I got into were primarily dictated by my work schedule. It’s nice to not have that as a factor, and even nicer to be able to fast forward commercials.

Having the DVR is a fairly recent development for us, but it has seen many different configurations since that time. I think the first thing we started recording regularly was Jeopardy!, followed by The Bold and The Beautiful. (That was originally for Mom, and then I kind of started watching it because my mother and all my aunts watched it, and then Julie and Maria got into it, and then it started getting so stupid that we had to give it up. I mean, it was always kind of stupid, but it has found crazy new lows to that stupidity.)

We did record new episodes of SVU, which we gave up, and we used the magic of DVR to record and watch every single King of the Hill episode. (Well, Julie and I did. Maria had a bad experience with a Texan that has hampered her enjoyment of the series.). We still have a handful of favorite episodes on tap for that.

We also used the DVR to watch A-Team episodes, first via BET and then through Centric. However, we have acquired DVDs for seasons 1-4 (5 sucked, but we may still pick it up for completeness sake), and this is better. First of all it does not take up precious DVR space, but also, what they air now has clips missing, and going back with the DVDs and seeing scenes that we remembered but have not seen since the 80’s has been pretty cool.  We are currently recording reruns of the Jack Benny show for the same reason.

I suppose to some extent it took us a while to get used to the technology, and start using it more. I have never been an early adopter. I guess it was partly a combination of increased familiarity, but also that there were shows that I kept reading about, and thinking I might like, but was not available to watch. I ended up setting up several season passes.

I can blame a lot of it on Television Without Pity. I would read recaps of shows, and think they sounded good, but sometimes even with shows that they did not recap, I would read in the forums, and see if they sounded good. Sometimes it’s just easier to read about television than to watch it. I know a lot about a lot of shows that I have never watched. But sometimes, you want to.

I was interested in both of the fairy tale shows, so I started recording both Once Upon a Time and Grimm. I thought I would be more interested in Once Upon a Time, but, while I like it a lot, I do prefer Grimm. At the time, even though I did not realize how much I would love it, part of recording Grimm was Portland loyalty, and that made me think I should also be recording Leverage and Portlandia. I also threw in Alcatraz and Person of Interest. (I have been recording White Collar for a while now.)

Now, that is already a lot of television, but it is pretty much all drama and action shows, with the exception of Portlandia. There were sitcoms that sounded good too. I have not set up any season passes, but I have at times recorded episodes of Community, Modern Family, and Parks and Recreation, (and sometimes 30 Rock, which I have watched before). Also, in Mexico my sisters became addicted to Big Bang Theory, and Maria will often record episodes of that.

That’s an awful lot of television. There was no way it could hold. In our next post, we’ll go over who made the cut.