Just as the baseball season is coming to a close, a new season is upon us - that of the Fall television season. After months of mundane TiVo near-ignorance, and dabbling in the BBC America network, primetime television roared back to life in our home earlier this week with the 1-2-3 combo of Bones, House, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. After a brief Wednesday's vacation, the TiVo whirred up again tonight, taking in Ugly Betty, CSI and ER.(I'll let you guess which two of the shows are slugged "wife only")
In the summer months away from the standard idiot box fare, we spent a significant amount of time enjoying our Nintendo Wii, reading 200+ RSS feeds in Google Reader, blogging a bit ourselves, picking winners on Ballhype, catching up on our Netflix queue, and attending a ton of A's games. Now, as we've regained yet another distraction from all the real work we need to do, some of those other items just might go down in the number of hours spent daily - or, in the cases of blogging or reading RSS feeds, they'll have to be done in parallel. There's nothing like sitting cross-legged on the bed with the laptop open while occasionally glancing up at the TV set to make sure you haven't lost track of the plot, after all.
To be honest, there weren't any real cliff-hangers from Spring that had us waiting with anticipation. In fact, we were disappointed, as we are every year, to see some of our favorite shows disappear, as Fox's hilarious War At Home was axed without fanfare and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was similarly canned, though a lot more noisily.
Now, our time with the TV becomes a balancing act. How do we make sure we train the Series One TiVo to get our BBC shows (Coupling and Hotel Babylon) without missing some season premieres? Is it possible to play the Nintendo Wii while watching CSI? (I think not...) And will our Saturdays be spent watching the two, three or four shows we missed during the week?
All I know is regardless of how many shows we take in, and whether we can possibly catch our fill of crime dramas, medical emergencies and jury trials, we'll have our TiVo remote in hand to zap through the commercials and save precious minutes with each episode. Hopefully, we won't find any more new shows to add to our own fall schedule, or I'll have to start calling in sick to the office.