It’s the end of an era. In early 2002, unemployment about to run out, DirecTV finally cut me off, taking with it my TiVo.
I didn’t turn the TV on for six months. It actually didn’t occur to me that I could switch over to antenna and watch broadcast TV, until the Buffy season was about to start. I had a job by then, and so could spare the $20 for rabbit ears so I could watch TV for an hour every Tuesday night.
B and I started dating that winter, and he would come over on Tuesday nights for B & Buffy night. That was pretty much the only TV we watched. After he moved in, I got us a GreenCine membership, and though we’ve watched a little more TV all the time, it’s mostly been rented TV shows and a little dinnertime broadcast watching.
And honestly, while TiVo is actually the greatest thing to ever happen since VCR, I haven’t missed it. What would I record? Cooking shows on PBS? I’ve only got 7 channels.
Tomorrow, the cable guy comes to drop us a new outlet and install digital cable. With the money we’ll get for Christmas, we’re buying a regular TiVo. I’m leaning toward the 40-hour one; after all, there’s no Buffy except on FX, and we might start recording Veronica Mars, and then there’s Medium (which totally ripped off one of the novels I’m working on) starting in January. They just cancelled Dead Like Me just as we finished watching the first season on DVD, and I’ve heard Six Feet Under isn’t worth watching anymore and is over after this season.
But we’ll have Food Network, and Bravo, and TLC. I’m sure I can find something to record.
Part of me is a little sad, though. I’d come to like not having enough TV that I needed to buy a device to watch it for me. I don’t want us to become couch potatoes, but maybe we can TiVo yoga on Oxygen.