TV, Thy Name is Waste

I won't get cable TV.

Nope.

I already pay about $55 per month for broadband cable internet. TimeWarner won't come down on the price of cable, and I'm not spending $100 a month just to be able to watch TV and get on the internet.

We use an antenna to pull in a digital television signal. It limits us in the number of channels we get, but, hey, there's not a lot we're interested in watching anyway. My oldest son would like to get NESN (a cable channel), so he can watch Red Sox games. When he has his own apartment, he is free to spend his money on such things.

We can get CBS, Fox and CW without having to fiddle with the antenna much. If we want other channels, we have to go through all sorts of antenna gymnastics. It just isn't worth the effort.

Fox used to have a pretty good lineup.

Monday through Friday, starting at 5:00 PM, we could catch two episodes of Scrubs followed by two episodes of Seinfeld. At 7:00 PM, Two and a Half Men came on, and we don't watch that, so the TV goes off.

Then from 8:00 on to 10:00, there have been pretty good lineups over the years. They included 24, House, Bones, Fringe, Dollhouse, Human Target, American Idol, The Good Guys. I won't try to recap any of the nightly schedules here because Fox has a tendency to move them all around, and I don't remember much except that Dollhouse was on Fridays and 24, Mondays.

Some shows ended. Some have been cut due to poor ratings.

American Idol only runs from January to May.

They stopped running Scrubs, but we found it on the CW. Just recently, CW replaced it with Friends.

When Fox stopped running Scrubs, they moved Seinfeld into those two time slots and started airing The Office. At first, I wasn't overly impressed with that show, but it grew on me. Now, The Office has been replaced with The Big Bang Theory which is flat out stupid and not so good.

24 ended its run. Dollhouse, The Good Guys and Human Target were cut.

I caught the premiere of X-Factor recently, thinking I might enjoy a trip down karaoke lane with Simon and Paula again, but turned it off after about fifteen minutes.

Of course, there's always Glee, which I don't care for.

There's New Girl which isn't impressive. There's Raising Hope - I don't watch that. Fringe and House, and Bones haven't had their season premieres yet.

So what used to be a pretty good couch potato lineup has left me with not much to mindlessly occupy my time.

Maybe I can use it to finish the novel I started three years ago, eh?