Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

There was an interesting article I read online that was published on TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly, but the jist of it was: Are there too many good TV shows out there where people just don't have time to watch, even in the age of DVR and Netflix?

I constantly feel consumed by TV shows I'm watching because like everyone here, we only have a certain amount of time so sometimes you have to pick and choose. Has anyone cut any 'good' shows they were watching in favor of only the 'great' shows because you only had so much time?

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

All the time. I try to watch most scripted pilots, at least so I know what a show is about and I often find hidden gems that way. But I usually have to make a quick decision to decide whether it is a show I have the time or inclination to watch. There is soooo much TV now, that now I have to make a pretty hasty decision. Whereas several years ago, I would give a show 6 episodes or so, now I am only giving 1 or 2. And often I just have to ask myself whether a show is truly entertaining or valuable to me in order to invest the time to stick with it.

That is why I pulled the plug early on such popular favorites as Game of Thrones and True Detective. I watched the first few episodes and decided they just weren't shows for me (even if they were well made and have a lot of talent involved.)

Sometimes I drop shows when I realize I just don't care about any of the characters or what happens to them. That happened this summer with The Whispers and Zoo. In normal summers, I would probably stick it out for the summer, but there was so much good tv this summer I had to trim the fat somewhere.

Speaking of this summer, I noticed this is the first summer where I have not been able to catch up as much on my backlog. I still have the entire last season of Justified to watch and normally I would have watched that in May/June when the regular season ended, but I just haven't had time with all the other good shows on this summer.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

Of course. For example, I've got every episode of Humans, Mr. Robot and Deutchland '83 just sitting on my dvr from this summer. I've watched the first episode of Humans (and I really enjoyed it), but haven't seen any of the rest. There just isn't time in my life. I've still got the last 7 episodes of The Walking Dead that I need to get through as well(although that's more of a comment on my feelings towards the show than a question of time). I also haven't seen a single second of Breaking Bad, I'm only about 2 episodes into season 6 of Mad Men and have only seen the first 4 episodes of the Shield. And you might as well throw movies in to the conversation as well. I have about a dozen saved on the dvr and probably 3 times that many sitting in my unwatched disc pile. Odds are I'm never going to watch all of the above, which kind of makes me sad.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

http://www.thewrap.com/why-fx-chief-...d-tv-industry/


Funny you bring up this topic. There was a recent article ^^^above where they interviewed the president of FX about this. He says there are over 400+ scripted shows on TV right now including streaming platforms and it's drowning viewers. He says smaller channels are going to get killed because of this.

Yes, I have felt overwhelmed. There's a bunch of Netflix originals that I want to watch, but can't because there's originals on cable and even network in the summer that keeps my viewing constant. I'm not a picky viewer like some here, but I have dropped a few in the past, which I like simply because I was overwhelmed.

I was a regular viewer of Bones for 8 seasons and yes I liked it. But unfortunately cut it because I couldn't devote my full attention to it. I only watched the first season of House of Cards on Netflix, but haven't continued because it's a show that I know needs my full attention and I can't give it that right now.

I'm sure there's many scripted shows that aired this summer that some here might have tried, but simply didn't have the time.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

The premise of the article seems a bit obvious, like "do you not have enough time to do everything you want to do?" :lol:

I think the huge number of shows available on so many channels and streaming services as well as the easy availability of many decades of catalog content (so much easier to find compared to when it had to be DVD or live TV) just makes it an impossible task to watch everything we want to.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

Think this applies to a majority of people.

I've got a list of probably 20 shows that I'm interested in checking out at some point.

Fall is going to be busy (at least what I consider busy) and it'll be tough to start anything new. I've got American Horror Story, Homeland, The League, Fargo, and The Walking Dead to keep up with.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

I have fallen behind on some shows and haven't had the time to keep up, only through s3 of the Walking Dead, s5 of Supernatural, s3 of Justified. I want to catch up through buying them on bluray, plus would like to watch Game of Thrones and Entourage.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

My backlog is so long that I don't bother adding many new shows to my viewing schedule anymore. Too many shows to keep up, whether catalog or current.

The only new show I added to my viewing schedule is CSI Cyber.


More generally, the stuff I'm more likely to regularly watch fits criteria like:

- I'm regularly home during the evening. (ie. Watching live tv on Friday, Sunday, etc ...)
- Summer schedule. (ie. Under The Dome, etc ...)
- Frequent reruns of current/recent episodes. (ie. Basic cable channels, etc ...)
- Genre. (ie. Sci-fi, etc ...)


My main judgement as to whether a new/current show is catching my interest, is whether I am willing to watch it live, or watching it on the dvr with a 20 minute delay.

Otherwise recording everything onto the dvr and watching it days (or weeks) later, just isn't cutting it anymore for me. In practice, I find that when I'm stockpiling episodes onto the dvr, they frequently end up going unwatched and are eventually deleted unwatched.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

I just said so long to UNDER THE DOME a few weeks back. :wave:

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

That doesn't count. UTD has never been regarded as a good show.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

I am a gigantic comic book nerd and I haven't found the time to watch Daredevil on Netflix despite stellar reviews. I think it's mainly because it's streaming and it'll be there when I want to watch it, without fear of a dvr filling up or having to track down a dvd. Same with Arrested Development.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

If it's great I will make space on my dvr, if it's just good I will wait until Netflix or Amazon prime and give it a go in the summer months....

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The premise seems obvious, but it sounds like industry people are treating this forecast by the FX head as some kind of bombshell ... instead of logical common sense. There are only so many people, with only so many hours to watch tv. Yet the number of series has doubled in just 5 years. And that doesn't count all the youtube and other web shows that are clamoring for attention.

I'm the same with Netflix shows. Haven't watched a single episode, because I feel like I have to prioritize other series that Netflix could lose the rights to at a moment's notice. It really sucks when you're just getting into a show on Netflix only to realize it disappears in less time than you have to finish it.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

^^^This. That is the reason I have never watched House of Cards, Kimmy Schmidt, Daredevil, or even the rebooted season of Arrested Development. I still need to watch the new season of Orange is the New Black. I just feel streaming shows will "always be there" while I need to clear out my DVR now.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

Absolutely. I pretty much have about 5 MUST-see shows. Everything else I try to watch, but if time's an issue, I just don't care anymore.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

Once I start a show, I usually see it through. I have plenty of shows that I want to watch and it's just a matter of time before I get to them.

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This is the reason I decided I wouldn't watch Fear the Walking Dead. Watching TV is starting to feel like a job.

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The primary reason I'm still watching Under The Dome, is that I've been home on Thursday evenings and there is nothing else on at 7pm.

In addition to the giggle factor.

:)

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

I think you may be on to something here.

I've been noticing the same thing, for shows I have on dvd (or bluray).

For example, I use to watch a lot of Star Trek franchise daily reruns. After purchasing the blurays, I find that I don't watch the shows much anymore. (ie. The dvds/blurays will "always be there").

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

Because I have a DVR that allows a hard drive, I have a lot of series that I haven't got to (I probably have about 250 hours on there), but once something shows up on streaming, -let's say the latest season of "Doctor Who", -I can delete the episodes off my DVR to make room. Of course, I'll get to those "later", but there isn't a priority unless I hear they're being dropped by Netflix. Also, as time goes on, some series kind of lose their appeal as they reach their end ("The Whispers", for example, which started out with some nice comments but as it went along everybody stopped talking about it, which I took as a "sign"). I definitely record far more than I'll ever catch up on, and the only thing that keeps me in check is that I have to clear stuff off the DVR.

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I do kinda wish that they released season sets for ongoing shows earlier, to allow some time for catch up. I have to catch up with Once Upon a Time, but doubt I'll be able to marathon a whole season before the next season starts, which kinda kills my interest.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

As in a removable hard drive, with an esata or usb2 (or usb3) connection?

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

Its a Motorola DVR with an e-sata connection. I have Charter cable. I had a Moxi box that I really liked and it allowed me to hook up a 1TB drive. It stopped working and Charter replaced it with a Motorola. Of course, I lost everything I had recorded on that drive. Fortunately, they replaced it with a Motorola model that also allowed for that hard drive, so at least I had an even greater capacity than I had before. I know some of the earlier Motorolas that some local friends were provided by Charter did not allow hard drives. Other than that, I find the DVR unpleasantly "quirky" in its operation compared to the Moxi.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

This is part of the reason why I've given up TV almost completely. A couple years ago I was constantly fighting DVR space and watching shows just to keep up with water cooler conversation. I pretty much just quit everything cold turkey.

When I was a kid, even though we had cable and lots of options, it seemed like most people enjoyed TV as an occasional diversion. Maybe an hour a day tops. But over time it seemed like everyone changed and it became normal to have a TV on most of the time, and to watch something every single day. Plus late night shows. Plus morning shows.

I don't know. I'm not saying TV is bad, or that the entertainment I do instead is better.

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Once I hit four episodes on the DVR I delete them and move on. If I haven't felt the need to catch up by that point I never will. I've been doing that quiet a bit lately with the comedies on FX.

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

I might dump Gotham but Monday nights are pretty empty.

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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.

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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.

:lol: 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.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

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.

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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.

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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)

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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....

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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.

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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.

Re: Does anyone cut shows from their viewing because there is too much to watch?
 

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).

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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.