Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I’m going OT, but I see this a lot and I just don’t get it. I don’t watch television, but if I did watch television, I wouldn’t watch television anyway if I thought it the “vast wasteland” of Newton Minow’s famous speech, if that makes sense.
I don’t watch television because I don’t like television. I don’t like the noise or the light and I’d rather read anyway. But if I wanted to watch television, this seems likes a golden age to me with tons of quality choices. Maybe not for hours every single evening, but for a few shows per week? I’d have a hard time narrowing it down.  |
Well...we've tried about 10 different streaming services, from the ubiquitous Netflix to Acorn when it was new, BritBox, Hulu, and a handful of lesser-knowns. And of course, the usual satellite/cable channels.
I think I may have mentioned before that my spouse has quite severe tinnitus, and he can't tolerate silence, despite the fact that it's my favorite thing. He needs noise to block out as much of the tinnitus as he can. The compromise is music or TV. (Yes, before anyone says it, we've tried white noise machines, aids, yadda...)
So, we definitely have the TV on more than I'd like. I try to make it less annoying by working at finding stuff that isn't horrible.
I am not a fan of reality stuff, which eliminates a lot of the current network and primary cable channel offerings, whether it's 8th-grade popularity stuff like Survivor or Big Brother or those sort of things, or alternate stuff like what you see on A&E or the like. Or Discovery stuff like "ice road truckers." (I think that's where that is.)
We don't care for comedies. So...mysteries are pretty much it, mysteries, some police procedurals and the like. My criteria, in this day and age, is reduced to "not stupid and not vapid." {shrug}. Or at least, "I don't know who the killer is, inside the first 5 minutes." (That one is harder to achieve than one would hope; plots are endlessly recycled.)
I keep looking for new-to-us stuff; Aussie mysteries or shows, NZ, anything British that we haven't seen, and anything with adequate, competent closed-captioning that we can read. Things like Harrow are pretty rote, but at least the quality of the acting isn't unwatchably bad and at least we haven't seen them previously. Oh, well.
Everyone's taste is different. I mean, shows that I would not watch--they're simply not my cuppa, like
Friends or
Seinfeld--were wildly popular, so...obviously, what I like
isn't so popular.
So, back to the topic at hand--yup, Tropes and clichés abound, whether in novels or TV.
Hitch