TiVo definitely is a life-altering gadget for die-hard television fans... but lately it seems as if I am having a brain melt trying to figure out how to get everything to "work" between our two TiVos (which btw, we named "Mary" and "Rhoda" ... Mary of course is our "main" TiVo, Rhoda is the back-up).
So here's the latest:
Monday night we have a conflict between Las Vegas and Prison Break. I will be the first to admit that Vegas is a sucky piece of television... but Josh Duhamel is still worth looking at for an hour and I do enjoy some of the other characters. So, we ended up recording Vegas on the main, Prison Break on the backup. However, then we got that "bug" where Fox shows were/are red-flagged on our TiVo... so we could not transfer PB to our main set (and the episode was deleted in one week's time) and, on top of that, the 4th episode of PB failed to record... so we just stopped watching/recording PB.
But then this weekend, F/X did a marathon of all of this season's PB episodes... so we decided to try again. We shifted Vegas over to "Rhoda," PB back to "Mary" (to avoid the red-flag issue that only plagues "Rhoda")... and then I found out that first-run episodes of Vegas run on TNT one week after they air on NBC... so while I do have the "Rhoda" pick up the Monday night airing of Vegas, I plan just to have "Mary" record the TNT repeat. Got it?!
Well, Tuesday is more of an ordeal... we have Amazing Race vs. Commander In Chief vs. My Name Is Earl/The Office. We decided to go with TAR on "Mary," CiC on "Rhoda"... and just pick up Earl and Office when they re-run. What has been nice is that ABC has re-aired a couple of episode of CiC on Saturday night (so no need to transfer) and NBC did a mini-Earl marathon recently on a Saturday night (so we got our first look at that series and kinda liked it).
So I ask why can't/don't the major networks regularly re-air their shows on one of the other dozen or so networks that they own? I'll answer my own question... I know it is all advertising related... the networks don't want you viewing their shows as a second-choice on a basic cable network. But I would love it, if say Earl and Office aired again (even a week late) on Bravo or CiC was shown on ABC Family.
To add even more chaos... our cable shows shift this coming weekend thanks to the end of Daylight Savings. While we don't change our clocks here in AZ, our non-major network TV shows do shift! So, for example, on Sunday nights we have been watching: Rome, West Wing, and Desperate Housewives ... which start airing at 6 pm. But with Daylight Savings ending, Rome (the East Coast feed) will shift to 7 pm... thus conflicting with West Wing... so TiVo won't record Rome until 10pm... and there is no way we are staying up that late on a Sunday night! So we are going to keep our Sunday viewing order intact by intentionally getting a week behind... so the "new" Rome will record at 10pm and we'll watch it before a "new" West Wing the following Sunday... got it?!
While TiVo is pretty smart, it is only a smart as the person that is behind the remote... and sometimes that can get pretty challenging!
What??!!
(And Adam Goldberg as a birthday stud? I mean, really.)
Posted by: clh | Tuesday, October 25, 2005 at 10:06 AM