I've consciously avoided Manhattan because I didn't want to add another "obligation"

I might dump Gotham but Monday nights are pretty empty.

If you deleted it, you should find a way to watch You're the Worst. I had it piled up on the DVR and watched all of them in about three days last Christmas.

B/c I travel so much for work now I find myself cutting shows much quicker than I used to. For instance I watched four seasons of Hell on Wheels and just dropped it after one episode this year. Sometimes it takes a while, but if I'm really interested I'll find a way to watch it eventually.

Absolutely drowning in TV. The last few seasons I dumped Person of Interest, Blacklist and recently Gotham. I enjoyed them all but each one just ended up sitting on the DVR far too long. As for streaming I gave up on OITNB, barely got through Daredevil and haven't had the time to devote to House of Cards.

I think a lot of this could be alleviated by switching the entire landscape to 13 episode seasons. You could watch more shows and not feel so burdened by shows that run the full year.

I'm amazed it's even still on. Probably one of my favorite 'new-ish' King novels, but man, I couldn't even finish season one. Horrid.

I am more merciless dropping shows than in the dim past. If a show becomes terrible like Hell on Wheels, I simply stop watching.

I also don't feel obligated anymore to watch every single episode of self-contained comedies I generally like. It's pretty easy to gauge fan reaction after an episode airs. I skip any comedy episode that has a poor fan reaction.

That's actually the only one I've stuck with. With Married, The Comedians, and Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll I made it through about 5 episodes of the first two and three of the last one.

I don't understand all the comments about making room on a DVR. 5 TB drives are fairly inexpensive. I just save over-the-air and cable card recordings and worry about watching entire seasons of shows later on. 5 TB goes a lot farther if I recompress the MPEG2 broadcasts with a better codec and remove the commercials.

I think the issue is not the amount of DVR space available. But some here feel overwhelmed with letting hundreds of hours of content sitting on their DVR unwatched with new shows/content continuously being produced and airing on a never-ending basis. There's really no break from recording content at all with new shows anymore. Not even in the summer. DVRs will start running out of space eventually. Some programs actually eat more space than others. I know The CW for example eats up a lot of space on my Directv Genie.

I mean I can understand the feeling of being trapped with so much to watch and not being able to get to it ASAP due to lack of time. And then another 100+ hours scheduled to record in the next few weeks. With so many other personal and professional commitments out there besides entertainment, it's pretty much near impossible to be on top of everything that's new. In this forum especially I've noticed a pretty big decline in many new shows getting talked about because there's just so much out there and many here either don't have the time or have an extremely short leash in sticking with stuff. 400+ shows currently airing with more coming in the next year or so is an insane amount of content.

Sure I could buy a 5TB hard drive and record as much shit as I want, but what's the point if I won't have the time to watch it?

How would watching 2 13-episode seasons of 2 different shows in the same timeslot make a difference? It's still the same amount of content over 8-9 months in the TV season. With one show having a 22-24 episode season, there's always intermittent breaks like the Holidays, New Year and early in the Spring unless they air it on a schedule like 24 from January to May non-stop.

There would be twice as many shows on the air. And what happens if the new show taking over fails? That business model doesn't really work with network TV because of the cost and higher risk. Cable is different because the budgets tend to be smaller and they don't have to program for 8-9 months. Cable has shorter seasons and that allows them to spread out their shows over a calendar year.

Yeah. Haven't watched DD, House of Cards or that Wachowski brothers series.

But I disagree about this summer having a lot of good shows. The only thing I really watched this summer is Suits, Halt and Catch Fire, Teen Wolf and Zoo. I also watch Fresh off the Boat, but I don't know when that premiered since I watch everything On-demand. I only watched Boat because I heard it was good, and though not always LOL, it's still pretty entertaining. (Though I would like to catch up on Humans and that other computer show, can't remember the name right now).

In the past few years, I've dropped a ton of shows. About 5 years ago, I had 3 VCRs (yes, VCR, I don't have a DVR) running on Monday and Tuesday nights. Now I don't watch a show that isn't on-demand and I WON"T watch anything live. Alot of shows have fallen through the cracks for me - Reign, Hawaii five-oh, Hell on Wheels, Bates Motel, American Horror Story, Royal Pains, Covert Affairs (Is this still onl?), Arrow, Agents of Shield, Cougar Town (when it was on) - to name a few.

I don't give many shows a chance unless I hear positive buzz, esp. comedies. Though this year, I am looking forward to Supergirl, that CW DC show and Limitless.

Not yet. I am about to become far more busy and I doubt I will have as much time to keep up with every tv show, movie, comic, you tube video etc... that looks entertaining. I will have to be more selective. Of course one can always catch up during the winter break.

One major thing that will help is NOT replacing shows that have ended with new shows. Yet I will have Heroes and Supergirl this fall. There is more than that yet I should keep it at that. I've had about three to four show end or be cancelled, a couple that I tried out, were renewed yet I hardly care if time is limited.

I like having new content to watch and I can watch it whenever I want (DVR like set up) and it can still get ridiculous. No way I could do this if I had to watch live, I dislike being controlled by entertainment like that.

Even though I'm not at that point yet if it ever does I would have to take another look at what I watch. I've felt that way with You Tube before. Too many videos on my sub box or watch list that look good yet I just don't have time for everything and it almost feels like work to watch them. (Yet they can still be entertaining)

This is my big dilemma right now, when to pull the plug on a new show if I am on the fence? Some shows just click for me on the first episode and its a no brainer (The Americans, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Homeland).

Right now I am watching Mr. Robot and just finished Episode 4. I like the show, I like the premise, but I don't love it...yet? I only have 6 more episodes so why not just finish the season and evaluate whether I want to watch it next year when Season 2 starts? But I have so many shows I want to watch, that part of me wants to bail because it isn't clicking for me like the shows I named above that I really love.

This is an interesting quote, because I tried to look back at my TV habits in the age before Cable TV Drama's and DVR, and it never felt like a job back then like it does now.

I think back to the early 90's and there weren't as many drama's, so I was watching more half hour comedies like Seinfeld, Cheers, Home Improvement, Coach, so it was only really 2-3 hours a week of appointment TV for me. Even by the late 90's/early 00's I was only watching The Sopranos, King of Queens, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Then the flood gates opened with The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, and then every cable network started making homegrown dramas....

That's going on the assumption that you would double the number of shows you'd watch when in actuality most would just pick up a few more. Say I have 10 full season shows I watch, In all likelihood I'm not gonna pick up 10 more if those were half seasons but it would allow me to check out a few more. You'd go from 222 episodes to 130 and then add in the new shows.

I actually like the 10 episode full seasons like a Game of Thrones. I noticed with alot of 13 episode season shows (or 16 with The Walking Dead) that there always 1-2 throwaway episodes that seem like filler. The Sopranos was always notorious for that as they would have a few episodes that would kind of stick out like a sore thumb that had nothing to do with the overall arc of the season.

Similar sentiments here too.

I more or less stopped watching tv regularly sometime in the mid-late 1980s. By then, most of the tv shows I liked were going off the air. (Stuff like Miami Vice, The A-Team, Magnum PI, etc ...).

Over the next 20 years or so, the only stuff that I was watching semi-regularly were Star Trek franchise reruns, and various random episodes of random shows which caught my interest while channel surfing. (Such as random episodes of Cheers, Jerry Springer, Geraldo, Seinfeld, Friends, Law & Order, Beavis and Butthead, Behind The Music, various A&E crime documentaries, etc ...).


Even back in the 1980's when I was watching a lot of cheesy action shows (and movies), it never felt like "a job" to me. For that matter, watching trash tv over the 1990s and early 2000s didn't feel like "a job" either.

But with that being said, more recently I have noticed that when I was watching through the complete series dvd sets of various 1970's and 1980's action shows I use to watch regularly back in the day, it started to feel like "a job" to me now. (Such as Magnum PI, the original Knight Rider, MacGyver, The Bionic Woman, Charlie's Angels, etc ...).

I don't know why exactly this is the case. The only semi-plausible explanation I can think of offhand, is that I am 30+ years older and watching it through the eyes of a middle aged adult. When I was a kid/teenager, everything seemed a lot more exciting and I had all the time in the world to watch a lot of tv. (This was in the days when there was hardly any school homework).

I really think it has more to do with the fact that we have access to every episode now in some form (Netflix, DVD's, OnDemand), and most shows these days have season arcs so you have to watch every episode in order.

It sounds like we grew up at the same time, so when we watched TV as kids you watched the shows when they came on during the week and that was it. If I missed an episode of The A-Team or Cheers it wasn't the end of the world, as I would catch it during the summer in re-runs or eventually in syndication. Now almost EVERY show I watch (even some comedies) have an arc, so you have to watch them from start to finish and cant just 'catch' an episode here and there.

In many ways its better TV then its ever been, but the downside is you have an obligation to these shows once you start. Like I said, I'm watching Mr. Robot right now and I either have to commit to the 10 episodes or bail after the 4th episode. 20-30 years ago (with exception of shows like Dallas, Knots Landing, etc.) the only chore about any show you watched was just making sure you were home when they came on because you couldn't DVR it.

Not that I mind a few shows being twenty two or so episodes. By being half of that one would either watch the same number of shows they currently or so or could even double them and take the same amount of time yet have a larger variety.

I'm glad several of the shows I watch are shorter, no way would a lot of us keep up on as many if they all had seasons that hit twenty two.

Wonder how much of this can be attributed to some kind of subtle "ocd" type behavior.

When I started regularly watching tv again (around 2007), I was watching Spike and AETV a lot, where they were playing a lot of CSI or CSI Miami daily reruns. Every day after I got home, I was watching as many as 5 or 6 episodes of CSI.

At the time, I felt a "compulsive obligation" to watch every episode of CSI and CSI Miami to date. Similar story with other shows I was watching in daily reruns at the time, such as the Law & Order franchise, Cold Case, Without a Trace, CSI NY, etc ...

That is just how TV is watched. There is no here and there with first time viewing. There is no starting on some random season without catching up first, there is no missing episodes. Every episode must be watched. Of course this is very normal to me as the way shows are watched since I can remember.

Now watching a ton of episodes very fast is something else, I did that a few times, rather not again.

More generally, I've come across similar behavior in other niches unrelated to tv shows, but which involved being on a "treadmill" of "collecting" something and feeling a "compulsive obligation" of wanting to "complete" it. (Another term to describe this is "compulsive completionist").

For example, niches like collecting comic books, certain magazines, Star Trek novels, cd/vinyl albums from particular rock bands, Star Wars figures, etc ...

I typically like to wait until the season is over completely and then binge watch it over a few days. I just prefer this method of watching TV. It becomes a lot easier to stick with good shows that I may otherwise give up on.

Gotham is a good example. I decided to watch that week to week and I gave up after awhile. The biggest issue there was that the show didn't run in consecutive weeks and it just wasn't good enough to hold my interest after a month long hiatus. If I chose to wait for the season to end and then watch all the episodes over a week, I would have stuck with it.

Yes. Less is more for me.

With the exception of Married, which I quit on in season one, I have episodes of the other two piled up on my DVR. I also have the entire last season of Louie as well as episodes of Man Seeking Woman. I'm sure I'll watch Louie at some point. Don't know about the others.

Bottom line is I record too many shows. Typically the summer is when I clear out the DVR. Finally got to the entire season of Empire and Aquarius. Glad I didnt delete those. Actually deleted a show that I had two seasons worth of epsiodes on there, unwatched. Down to about 8% on the DVR right now. Trying to get it even lower before the season starts. The problem is, is that there are so many other shows out there that I want to watch. Finally getting around to watching season 6 of Community. Still ahvent seen the latest season of Orange is the New Black or the first season of Daredevil.

I've been really making an effort in the last few months to eliminate shows from my viewing schedule. I buy so many movies yet never have a chance to watch them because I'm trying to keep up with TV. I decided to rededicate myself to films so I needed to get rid of some shows.

Not including the ones that ended or were canceled, I've dropped Blacklist, Married, Under the Dome, Castle, Ray Donovan, Turn, House of Lies, Sleepy Hollow. I know there are a few more, but those are off the top of my head. I know that may not seem like a lot, but that's a lot for someone who traditionally will stubbornly continue to watch a show until the bitter end. I'm hoping to drop some more once fall shows return. I already have a lot more free viewing time, though.

You're using an HTPC as a DVR. The DVR set-top boxes provided by cable companies are more limited. For example, FiOS DVRs don't currently support larger than 2TB external eSATA drives:
http://forums.verizon.com/t5/FiOS-TV...TB/td-p/694884
https://www.verizon.com/support/resi...ta/129841.htm#