Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Random thoughts on late-night TV

Sometimes near the end of the day, Dan and I relax in front of the TV—maybe watch a little news or catch the second half of CSI. More often than not we have a TV language rule by this hour: nothing in Spanish. No soccer (definitely no soccer!), no dubbed sitcoms, no Latin American talk shows—nada. It’s an English-only television-viewing zone, and thankfully—with gratitude to the magic button on our remote that removes dubbing from certain shows—we have a handful of decent American channels from which to choose.

So what if we’ve already seen every episode of Seinfeld a zillion times? Who cares that the rerun of Law & Order is from the days of Lenny Briscoe and Ben Stone? We can get some of these old shows plus Fox News and CNBC—which is what we most commonly watch—and in a pinch, we’ll even watch local news for Denver, the city that provides our network feed.

Dan’s traveling a lot this month, so I’ve been reading at night or hanging out here on the computer hoping to catch him on IM. The no-English TV stuff has been less of an issue. (Though I gotta admit, I did catch an episode of Growing Pains—circa 1987—the other night. Too bad it wasn’t the episode with Brad Pitt, but I still enjoyed the Seavers’ antics. And Wow! Check out that big ‘80s hair!)

Of course mostly what’s on TV now is election coverage stuff, and we’re starting to burn out on that a bit. (We’ve already voted—and yeah, it’s important to stay on top of what’s going on, but it’s not like I’m gonna call the United States and ask to change my ballot, right?) Tonight I’ll watch the debate and all the pundits taking jabs at the candidates and each other afterwards. It’s almost like I’m rubbernecking after an accident on I-75. I want to look away for a while but just can’t.

Overall, we watch less TV here than in the US. We don’t have DVR, we don’t have high def (which we desperately miss during football season) and we have a much smaller selection of choices when it comes to programming. I miss the DVR (because really, who wants to watch commercials?) and certainly we are looking forward to the return of HD when we move back to the States, but other than that, the limited selection is OK. Though I admit we draw the line for watching American shows at MacGyver. (Talk about hair styles of the ‘80s!)

I really do wish we could get the US version of SportsCenter on ESPN, but I won't complain (at least not too loudly or too often!).

1 comment:

Stonefox said...

The language thing has totally trashed my TV viewing! I haven't watched it in over six years! But I sure would like to sit down to a worthy program every now and again...