It’s not you, Television, it’s me

The fall 2013 television season seemed to start with all kinds of promise for me. A Dracula! An Ichabod Crane! The Marvel Mo-Fo Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. How could I not set my DVR to RECORD ALL, and then sit back and wile away the late evening hours glued to those bright, beautiful 42 inches of LCD-love with a bowl of spicy cheddar pork cracklin’s and a tall glass of beverage?

For a few weeks, that’s exactly how it rolled.  Well, minus the questionable pork snacks and poorly-defined beverage. As it turns out, if I’m going to snack on anything these days, the gentleman prefers sea salt kettle-style potato chips (made with a list of ingredients I can both pronounce and possibly procure at the local grocery). And I think we all know what I most commonly select as the beverage of choice within a 5 foot radius. No, it’s not Ovaltine.

But somehow, as the weeks became months, I found myself slowly letting episodes build up on my DVR to the point the poor device was choked like the doorway of GameStop  on Call of Duty release day. Yes, even though I still plop down on the couch for some pre-bedtime mind-easing entertainment every night after my requisite book work is done and my nightly M&Ms have been munched, I often just don’t feel like watching the previous week’s recorded shows. Or the ones from the week before that.  Or the week before that.

It’s not that I hate any of the shows I originally geeked about, but I just don’t feel that spark either. When there’s a show I love, I hate when it ends and anticipate the next episode. Every week I can’t wait to see those opening credits roll. Game of Thrones is like that; it hits me in the compulsion. Battlestar Galactica and Stargate: Universe were the same way.

Ultimately, though, all the new shows from this season barely struck me in the meh. The thing is, when you have as few hours a week as I do to dedicate to consuming visual entertainment, meh just doesn’t do the job. If I don’t love something so much I’m excited to see it and still think about it when the end credits scroll up, well, then I kind of feel like I’m wasting my time.

And as we all know, time is finite, and I’m pretty picky about what I do with mine.

That’s not, of course, to say that I consider the three shoes I listed above as equivalent.  I don’t. Far from it actually. Dracula bored me to tears in less than three weeks while I expect that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D will improve as it finds its footing.  And Sleepy Hollow is actually lovely to the point that I can’t think of anything bad to say about it. But I’m not quite engaged enough with it, either. I think I just want us to be friends.

Being friends just doesn’t do it.

So what does that all mean? Not much. It means that I canceled all the season recordings for the shows I set up in the fall. My DVR is now officially underworked. It also means that if you want to know what I’ll be doing most nights at 11:30 PM, you can probably find me playing Skyrim.

Either that or watching Geek & Sundry and/or  Epic Meal Time videos on YouTube.

Because everybody loves geeky stuff and bacon.

Pud’n