Nobody Knows Anything

We’ve been living in the rental house for a year now (yeah, the remodel will be done any minute now), so it’s probably time to check out how our experiment of dumping a cable connection is going.

Answer: it’s going really well. We’re not going back.

Turns out that we’re not alone, of course: a lot of people are saying farewell to cable.

Pre-move, we had DSL via Speakeasy for $145 a month, plus DirectTV for $95 a month, plus Netflix for $23 ($263 a month). We had lots of premium channels (HBO, Showtime), and we didn’t buy movies. We sometimes bought stuff via iTunes, for when our system broke down or recorded a poor copy of something.

When we moved, we cancelled Speakeasy (they couldn’t get us the speed we wanted) and picked up Comcast cable internet ($63…and roughly the same speed we had before *headdesk*). And we either watched shows via iTunes, Netflix DVDs, or Netflix on Demand. The kids in particular have taken to Netflix on Demand like a duck to your Sunday picnic. Over the past year we’ve spent $1453 on the iTunes TV store (wow, that looks amazing to write out like that), or $120 a month. Plus $23 for Netflix.

Which means we’re spending roughly $203 a month now. For shows without commercials, often in higher quality than the broadcast versions.

I think I’m going to change our Netflix subscription to be the one DVD + On Demand stuff, which is something like $10 a month.

True, we don’t get sports or 24 hour news stations, but we don’t care. We don’t have the movie channels (if we really need a movie, we’ll rent it from iTunes or wait for the DVD). Our house is right near the Santa Cruz mountains, which interfere with all broadcast stations, or I would get an antenna to cover local channels.

We recently had a small vacation and while staying in the hotel sacked out in bed to watch Food Network (oh, Bobby Flay, my daughter has missed you). Used to be we were annoyed by regular TV because we couldn’t pause or fast-forward over commercials, like we could with TiVo. Now we’ve found regular TV practically unwatchable. I don’t miss it at ALL.

Comcast keeps offering us deals where we can get a faster internet connection if we also pick up a cable subscription, and the combo will cost less than it’s costing now. Darin keeps responding, “How much for just the faster internet?”

Unless one of the kids suddenly develops a need to watch sports, we’re not going back.

I have been enjoying this NBC/”Tonight Show”/Jay&Conan nonsense as much as anyone over the past week—mostly due to the sincere snarkery of TV critics like Alan Sepinwall, Mo Ryan, and Tim Goodman, as they tweeted the best lines and gossip as overheard at the Television Critics Association meeting—but I admit to being flabbergasted that late night is still this big a deal. Seriously, paying Conan O’Brien forty million dollars to go away, when few people were even aware he was there?

Of course, this is the same network that’s pissing two hundred million dollars down the Olympic hole, so what do they know?

(When it’s quite clear that I could run a television network better than these bozos can…it’s safe to say, “You’re doing it wrong.”)

It’s hard to remember (or to believe), but here’s why “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson was such a big deal: That’s the show where you got to see the stars. If you wanted to see a star chatting and “letting loose” with a host who made them feel at home and let them talk a bit, you watched “The Tonight Show.”

We didn’t have TV and internet 24/7 filling endless hours with minutiae of the stars’ lives, with the reality shows letting us in on every little goddamn minute of these people’s days. Yes, there were supermarket tabloids, but news channels barely existed in 1992, when Carson quit. Now when anything having to do with a celebrity happens, we get endless blathering coverage, filling air time, hoping against hope that they will get the money shot of someone overdosing or whatever. And if you want to watch something at 11:30pm, how many choices do you have now? Answer: lots.

Johnny Carson was an amazing host, and here’s what he did that I’ve seen rarely since: he listened. Letterman never listens to the guest; he’s on to the next scripted question while the star is still babbling their scripted answer to the last one. I don’t know if Craig Ferguson listens, although he seems like he might. Jay Leno certainly never listens (to anyone, if these stories burbling out are correct).

We have endless talk and columns and blog entries (hey there) about this segment of TV history that has, frankly, passed. Except for the part about them having even more hours that they need to fill, and they can’t fill them all with obvious infomercials.

All I’m wondering is, if they can afford forty million dollars to make Conan go away, how much money is every hour of broadcast TV worth? And could they start coughing up some more public-interest programming as part of the price?

We made a couple of changes to our life when we moved out of our house and into this rental house. For one thing, we moved from a 2800 square foot house without a garage to a 2200 sq. ft. house with a garage, so we took a hard look at many of the things we owned and either said, “Bye,” or “Into a box in the garage you go.” (All of our books? Packed away. ALL. Except the kids’, who have been insistent that their books needed to be liberated, and so they were.)

Another thing was that we got rid of was the satellite TV.

And despite going with Comcast for our internet connection, we didn’t pick up cable. We have no direct connection to the wide world of television out there. I suppose we might be able to get “over the air” broadcasts (are those still happening even?), but we haven’t tried.

One night back at our house I found Darin in the TV room watching some movie and I asked what it was. “I don’t even know,” he said. “It was just on.”

“That is a silly reason to watch something.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Did we need all of these movie channels? We rarely watched stuff off of them. Did we need the 100s of basic cable channels? Not much. We thought about how we were spending $90 a month on satellite—that’s $1080 a year!—on stuff we just never watched.

And things we did want to watch… Well, there was always iTunes. We’d gotten into the habit last year of just buying “Lost” on iTunes every week, because for some reason the ABC-HD feed in our area kept messing up the transmission. Or our satellite dish was pointed the wrong way, but only on Wednesday nights.

$1080 divided by $30 (avg. cost of iTunes subscription?) equals 36 shows a year. I would be amazed if all of us watched 36 separate series a year. Here’s what I’ll be watching:

• Lost: Final season. SOB.
• Dollhouse: The name “Joss Whedon” buys a lot. The logic gaps are sometimes infuriating and Eliza Dushku is not exactly right for this material. But it’s okay.
• Community: So far this has been hilarious. “Sharks, pencils, and Ben Affleck.” Good times.
• The Simpsons: Yes. Still.
• 30 Rock: When it’s good, it’s great, and when it’s not, it’s still okay.
• Chuck: Of course! Even if it’s on NBC!
• Dexter: A little Michael C. Hall covers up many storytelling weaknesses.

Darin also watches Mad Men (which I personally can’t stand), The Office, and Big Bang Theory (which I’ve enjoyed the few times I’ve seen, but I have a hard time loving sitcoms, despite having three of them in my above list).

I want to watch National Parks (which Nina said KQED is streaming? Let’s get that computer hooked up to the TV, people just discovered iTunes is carrying this one!).

We find series, by the way, following the advice of our most trusted TV critics: Alan Sepinwall (who as every “Chuck” fan knows, is DA MAN) and Ken Tucker (whose in-print stuff for EW is better than his blog, but never mind that). See? Critics are worthwhile, people.

So far it’s worked out great: we have stuff on the Apple TV we want to watch, we can store the old shows (or watch them on the computer, or on our iPhones, or whatever without too much hassle), and we don’t have the lure of just anything being on. Darin has been reading The Lord of the Rings to the kids, and as soon as they finished “The Fellowship of the Ring” we rented the movie. Simple.

What we’re missing out on: Food Network shows. My daughter misses her daily dose of Bobby Flay. Perhaps Food Network will figure out a way to deal with this.

Even if we do end up paying more than $1080 a year—I’m going to try to mark the various series subscriptions in Quicken to keep track of how much we end up spending—on the whole this system is a much better TV experience than watching cable/satellite. No commercials to fast-forward through! No endless promos for other shows! No teasers ruining the entire show before we see it!

Now if Darin would just hook up our DVD player so I could restart the Netflix subscription, that’d be good. Of course, what he really wants to do is get a PS3 “so we can watch Blu-ray disks.” Uh huh. I am the kind of “stupid wife” who “believes that.” My friend Otto also recommends hooking up a Mac mini, so as to use Hulu on the TV. But we don’t have a Mac mini. Maybe the kids will sacrifice their iMac for the cause…. HAHAHAHA. Just kidding.

Since sitting in front of the TV and just watching what’s on is not my idea of a good time, this setup is working perfectly for me. If I want to sit around and stare at a screen for hours to waste time…I’ll use my iPhone to play games, thanks.

We also gave up our home phone in the move. Yes, it’s true: Darin and I no longer share a phone. But everyone knows that to contact him you call his cell phone, and having the answering machine at home mostly served as a vehicle for frustration for me (since he never listened to messages). Now I get everything on my phone and it’s much easier for me to stay on top of calls I need to return and messages I need to deal with.

Dang. We really are living in the future.

In no particular order:

• Much to my own amazement, since my decision not to drink alcohol because it’s interfering with my exercise plan, I have not in fact had any alcohol. There was one night I actually wanted to have a cocktail, but we didn’t have a lot of time and I did have to work out the next day, so I passed. Saying no to margaritas at La Fiesta is pretty goshdarned hard, though. They make a very tasty, and very deadly, margarita.

• I know I need to post some pix of My! Amazing! Transformation!™. I need to get batteries for my camera. How lame of an excuse is that? And yet: oh so true.

• My guilty pleasure these days: SecretTweet. I have no idea if these are real or not, but unless they start mentioning space aliens or something, they could be. This is the kind of thing that makes me appreciate my own life more.

• Movies we’ve seen recently:
  • Sin Nombre: I don’t know the provenance behind this movie. I was looking for something to see and I used the Rotten Tomatoes score to come up with one. It’s a film in Spanish with subtitles about a family trying to get to US from Honduras, and a boy who’s part of a violent, territorial Mexican gang, how they meet, and what happens. The simplicity of the storylines and the tightness of the focus on the story I think shows it’s clearly a first film by a young writer/director, but he’s a very talented writer/director who is interested in issues that have no easy and clean solutions.

  • Adventureland: It’s a very sweet look at summer 1987 after a kid graduates from college before he starts grad school. I’m kind of disturbed that 1987 = historical flick though. I liked it, but it was a small movie. I’m also kind of tired of movies in which everyone’s shared experience is one that I have nothing in common with. At least it’s not as bad as when I watch a high school movie and might as well be watching an artifact from a lost African culture for all I have in common with it.

  • Sunshine Cleaning: An interesting indie film that suffered from one too few passes on the script. Yes, the scriptwriter is saying this. There was some really good material in here, but it needed…I don’t know. Some kind of oomph. And less randomness.

  • I Love You Man: Paul Rudd is every girl’s fantasy boyfriend—the fantasy boyfriend you could bring home to mother. (You save the other fantasy boyfriend for…well…you know.) It was definitely an enjoyable flick, and I remember very, very little about it, other than they didn’t do the obvious (and so overdone) thing of having Rudd’s character end up in a fracas with another woman, leading his girlfriend to draw the wrong conclusions! which I was definitely expecting.

  • Monsters vs. Aliens: Jesus, does Pixar make it look easy, and then everyone else makes it look so hard. I don’t even remember that much about MvA, other than I was impressed that Hugh Laurie can do yet another accent that isn’t his normal voice. Such a great title though. Man, such a great title.

• There are simply no words to describe how much “Lost” has rocked since they, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, decided to “let the freak flag fly.” You know none of the actors signed up to be part of a sci-fi/ancient Egyptians/ghosts/assassins/time travel/comedy/romance/action/adventure spectacular, and you know just as hard that the writers/creators could give a flying fuck what the actors signed up for. They have an end date! They don’t have to spin this out forever! Let’s ROCK this town!

• Darin says the official “Lost” podcast by Damon and Carleton is Teh Awesum, so you should listen to that. (I have zero time to listen to anything, I’m finding, so I have not added it to any of my iPods, but I laugh like a hyena when Darin recounts the latest one.)

• And, as always: Actors, there are no small parts, only small actors. Michael Emerson signed for two or maybe three episodes. And he took over the entire damn series. You can do it, folks.

• I thought “The Unusuals,” a new cop show on ABC, was going to be about a precinct of detectives in NYC who have very strange, minor superpowers. I like my idea for the show much better than theirs: It turns out to be a very boring police procedural about a bunch of cops Who Are Quirky. We took it off the list of stuff to be recorded during the first half hour.

• I was mostly satisfied by the “Battlestar Galactica” finale—so long as they ended without Galactica, say, plunging into a nearby sun with everyone on board I was going to be okay. (The show was so dark for the last half season I honestly didn’t know what they were going to do.) As Ted Tally says, you have to give your audience a little glimmer of hope at the end. Just a tad. I think the BSG guys didn’t have as tight a grip on their stuff as the Lost guys do, but there was still so much wonderful stuff in there over 4 years I don’t care. (For example: if you’re going to start every episode with the statement that the Cylons have a plan, get a kilo of cocaine, lock all the writers in a room for the weekend, and figure out that damn plan before you go Season 2, okay? Remember that for next time.)

No, I haven’t completely lost my marbles—that’s one of the hilarious lines from Life on Mars, which Darin and I just finished watching. For those of you who haven’t heard the hype, it’s the story of Sam Tyler, a DCI in 2006, who gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. Did he really go back to 1973, or is he in a coma? And if he is in a coma, how on earth did he imagine 1973 in such vivid detail?

The show is absolutely wonderful, and John Simm (who’s in practically every frame, because the entire series has to do with his POV) is fabulous as Sam Tyler. The big breakout star from this is evidently Philip Glenister, who plays DCI Gene Hunt (or, Gene ‘unt, as everyone calls him), and he’s completely hysterical as the foul-mouthed, old-school policeman who does not understand any of Tyler’s wacky innovations to police work, such as “surveillance” or “profiling.”*

The first episode of Series 1 and the last episode of Series 2 are completely brilliant. (That ending! It’s the feel-good ending of the year!**) The episodes in between range from the good to the really, really good, with some utterly hilarious lines, and not just the anachronistic one from the title of this entry. The depiction of 1973 does make it seem like they’re on a completely different planet. (Although, as Darin put it, if you could actually get someone from 1973, they’d probably watch this show and point out tons of anachronisms. Doesn’t matter. Close enough.)

If you want to see it, either demand Region 1 DVDs of it or, er, find other ways of getting it. I didn’t watch it on BBC America, but since each episode was 55-60 minutes long and filled with swearing, they must have chopped the hell out of it.

David E Kelley is remaking this series for the US. So…one guess: it’ll be set in Boston, 1973. I’m also going to wager one of the first story notes from the network is, “Change the ending,” because there is no way an American network would approve that. (Cable: maybe.) I haven’t the slightest clue how they would drag this show out for 22 or 24 episodes a season. It is primarily a police procedural in time travel garb, and police procedurals have become extremely tired and stale of late. (Cf. Life, a show I love and miss—Damian Lewis: fabulous; police procedural part: oy.)

* When we started watching the show, Darin said, “You know who the guy playing Gene Hunt reminds me of? Colm Meaney.” And when I went to the IMDb page for the American version, lo and behold: Gene Hunt will be played by…Colm Meaney.

** If you don’t know what the ending is, don’t seek it out. I unfortunately got spoiled by Alan Sepinwall, so I knew what was coming, but Darin was like, WHOA.

• So, there is a movement afoot to take next year’s Foothill New Works Festival to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Pretty much the major reason why we wouldn’t do it is if the American dollar goes to, I dunno, 3 or 4 to the British pound. But! Doctor Who as Hamlet! I am so there! Must. Go. To. UK. Somehow. Go, Apple stock!

• Please to watch this absolutely brilliant four-minute-long opening credits sequence for The Kingdom, which manages to cover the salient history between Saudi Arabia and the US. I still have no interest in seeing this movie (despite the presence of the ever-awesome Jason Bateman), but this sequence: Wow. When’s the last time you saw a credits sequence this memorable? (For that matter, when’s the last time you saw a credits sequence? Seems like they’ve been missing from every movie we’ve seen recently.) (Via Making Light)

• Speaking of movies you should see or Netflix immediately: The King of Kong. I have to say, I wasn’t that thrilled about going to see a movie about a showdown between two Donkey Kong players (I don’t even like arcade games), but this documentary about what happens when a guy decides he wants to beat the high score in Donkey Kong is fabulous. I am so happy Darin and I went out of our way to see it in downtown San Jose.

• Have you ever said to yourself, “Self, I need a Hostess cupcake that’s bigger than my head”? Well, if so, Nicole at Baking Bites has felt your pain, made the band-aid, given you pictures and a recipe.

• Jon Carroll gets right on the whole no-gays-in-Iran thing, discovers there are some who “believe that Iranians will like any group of Americans that doesn’t try to kill them.”

• There are approximately 8 million people in the greater Los Angeles area, at least 2 million of whom have SAG cards. And the producers of the number one hit show on TV from last year couldn’t find at least FIVE who could do a decent Irish accent for the opening show of the season?

• Speaking of the fall season, is there anything out there that I absolutely, positively must catch amongst the new shows? We watched Moonlight because of Jason Dohring (he of Veronica Mars fame), and our JD love remains intact because he was the only good thing in this amazingly horrible pile of dreck — he managed to deliver unsayable dialogue with panache. The rest of the show was poorly written, poorly acted, and poorly stitched together. We had to turn it off halfway through, and we never turn off shows.

We’ve also watched Reaper (yay, Ray Wise, but we liked this show much better when it was called Brimstone) and Chuck (yay, Adam Baldwin, but sorry, dude: you’ll find a better show eventually).

Darin really likes Mad Men (the portrayal of women’s roles in 1960 gives me the heaves — let me just put it this way: I hate it when I hear a woman mutter that she doesn’t believe in feminism, and this show perfectly dramatizes why).

• My God, Torchwood is silly stuff. The big mystery to us is how Captain Jack kept his American aviator’s coat in such perfect condition for the past 60 years — perhaps he had one made up in alien fabric.

• Have you ever said to yourself, “Self, I need a wrist rest that’s both useful and funky”? If so, the people at the What On Earth catalogue have felt your pain and produced the Baguette Wrist Rest. (Via Nicole at Baking Bites.)

• The ever-fabulous Otto passes along the best of Craiglist Boise:

2 COWS OR MORE – $1

Reply to: sale-437692507@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-10-01, 11:32PM MDT

HERE IS THE DEAL IF YOU WANT TO RAISE YOUR BEEF I HAVE THE PLACE.LETS TALK
CALL xxx-xxxx
——————–

Free Llamas–You catch, you haul

Reply to: see below
Date: 2007-10-02, 10:00AM MDT

We have three llamas that we don’t have time for. They’re free, but you need to catch them (in a corral) and haul them. One young male, one adult male and one adult female. These llamas have NOT been trained for packing. Please call Tony at xxx-xxxx.

I think I’ve been in this discussion:

The kids’ obsession recently has been World of Warcraft, to the point where they were continuously fighting over who got to play. “You played last! It’s my turn!” “No, you played! It’s mine!” (This is how they play: they start a character, do all the intro quests, lose interest, start another character. Sophia has shown great fortitude in getting a character all the way to level 15.) So, finally I came up with this rule: Sophia was born on an even day, so she plays on even days; Simon was born on an odd day, so he plays on odd days; only Mommy gets to play on the 31st.

And this plan, almost unbelievably, seemed to work out just fine.

My current obsession has been Doctor Who. The third season has been playing here, and I love it so much that, while I can pass on watching anything until a few days have gone by, Friday night I am right there in front of the TV. (Albeit, after it’s TiVo’d—can’t stand commercials.) I have recently become so into it I a)joined NetFlix (nope, hadn’t been a member before) and b)queued the first two seasons to watch at home. I’d never seen any of the Christopher Eccleston ones, and we missed about half of season two.

The day my first NetFlix movies arrived Sophia had a friend over, and they were off playing in her room, while Simon stayed with me. He, of course, wanted to play World of Warcraft, but it wasn’t his day. So I said, “Hey, wanna watch Doctor Who with me?” We snuggled on the couch and I put the first disc in. And it was hilarious—FTW: “If you’re a space alien, how come you sound like you’re from the North?” “Lots of planets have a North!” (Eccleston has a northern British accent you could cut with a chain saw). Simon thought it was the greatest thing ever.

The next day Simon said, “Can we watch another one?” and Sophia said, “Another what?” So she sat down to watch the Doctor and Rose get into various messes.

The day after that, when I got home with the kids, the first thing they asked was, “Can we watch another Doctor Who?” No one mentioned World of Warcraft. It was somewhat blissful. Of course, now my DVDs have run out and I have to get the next set post-haste.

But when the Doctor’s in the house…no Warcraft! Yes!

Via, of all things, First Draft: Things I Am Not Allowed To Do About Galactica

1. Not allowed to refer to Samuel Anders as “Mr. Kara Thrace.”
* Not allowed to refer to Major Adama as “Mr. Kara Thrace.”
* Especially in front of his wife.
* Not allowed to suggest to Major Adama’s wife that she “do the cheating frakhead one better” by joining me in the rear cargo bay after hours.
2. Not allowed to refer to Admiral Adama as “Mr. Laura Roslin.”
3. Not allowed to spell Colonel Tigh’s name “T-G-H” and claim “the Cylons took the I,” as it is cruel and not remotely funny.
* Okay, so it’s hilarious. It’s still cruel.
…
36. Not allowed, under any circumstances, to ask President Roslin who died and put her in charge.
37. The time has passed for the joke about the Cylon, the pyramid team, the elevator, and Ellen Tigh.
* Or any of its variants.
38. There is no such thing as “recreational gun use.”
* No, not even if Captain Thrace did it first.
* Oh my gods, especially not if Admiral Cain did it first.
* Not allowed to mention Admiral Cain. Ever.
39. Captain Thrace is not a pre- or post-op ANYTHING.
40. Not allowed to utter the phrase “Save a Viper! Fly a pilot!” ever, ever again.
…
373. I cannot plug my laptop into Hera.
*Even if the battery is about to die.
*I cannot “borrow” her to replace my Viper battery.

374. If I see Gaeta glaring at Colonel Tigh, I cannot offer him a pen and “see what happens.”
*You can poke an(other) eye out with those things.

375. A glower from the Admiral cannot be alleviated with an offering of Metamucil.
376. The Admiral, The Vice President, and the President’s relationships cannot be explained by substituting in characters from “Dawson’s Creek.”
*Likewise regarding Lee, Dee, Kara, & Anders and the show “Passions.”
*I am not a soap star.
*I am not a porn star.
*I am not allowed to ask Anders or Apollo to costar in any video ventures.
*Captain Thrace and Major Apollo’s relationship may also not be explained by “OK, imagine if Han Solo slept with Luke Skywalker.”

377. “Awww,” is not an acceptable reaction when the President and Admiral walk into a room together.
*The same goes for Baltar and Gaeta.
*Or Tigh and Cottle.

At least, spoilers about them. Darin and I can’t watch the final two episodes until Wednesday at the earliest, and whilst in New Jersey yesterday I saw a gigantic spoiler about last week’s episode. (The Sunday Star-Ledger had a lot of space devoted to the end of the Sopranos. Sigh.) Given the number of blogs I look at, I can tell this is going to be tough. No newspapers. No Salon. Definitely no talking to Otto.