Bonus: and that likely explains why older shows tend to have self-contained episodes while newer shows tend to be serial.
On the flip side they’ll not get to experience knowing that the channel you were watching was the exact same for everyone. It feels really strange and isolating to me to know that what’s on my TV right now is streaming just to me.
I know it’s silly; we were still watching TV alone, but there was something about knowing that other people were watching the same thing at the same time that made it better.
Now, even when I watch cable, I’m not sure very many people are watching at the same time because a lot of people are DVRing it
Also, thanks to the practice of broadcast syndication, new series were often given at last 3-4 seasons to run even if the ratings weren’t great at first since it was more profitable to get the series to around 80 to 100 episodes then to cancel it early.
They also don’t have the experience of only seeing half the episode because you were channel surfing, and not getting to see the rest of it until you catch another rerun two years later.
I remember my sister and I watching the movie A Little Princess on tv multiple times but always missing the beginning. We didn’t know the name of the movie until we came across the book.
Even worse was that they would “cut movies to length” which actually meant it was stuffed full of commercials and then parts of the movie got trimmed off to make it fit in the time slot that they wanted to fit it into. I honestly grew up thinking that most of Clint Eastwoods westerns were completely fucking insane. They were just so damn random and often kinda rapey. Then I finally watched one on a cable with no commercials. I was so fucking confused. I thought I was having a stroke. Finally someone understood what was going on and explained to me about how they cut the movies for tv
A few years ago, I was watching Home Alone 2 on tv with my family and my brother-in-law pointed out that they cut the part where the family wakes up and sees they slept in and are all frantic. Kind of important to the plot because it helps explain why they’re in such a hurry at the airport, they leave Kevin behind. Yet they left in Donald Trump’s useless cameo, which adds nothing to the story. Apparently previous broadcasts cut Trump’s cameo and people complained because sensationalist headlines told them it was political when it was really because of time reasons and his cameo being unimportant to the plot.
The really crazy part is that if they just increased the time slot, they would have room to stuff in even more commercials. So why cut anything at all?
you say that but Jellyfin has a random button so you can get random episodes from anything in your media library.
hoping for a pre season 10 episode of the simpsons at 7:30 and being disappointed.
There was a charm to it, I discovered lots of programs from the randomness, one of which is my all time favourite doctor who (it caught me off guard as I saw what I now know was the third doctor Jon Pertwee being beaten up by Morris dancers). It’s the one thing I wish was integrated into streaming services. Just a ramdomiser button and it plays whatever.
I never would have expected to, but I miss channel surfing.
Now I get analysis paralysis flipping through a million thumbnails on various streaming services and I don’t see anything I want to commit to, but if I was channel surfing, 20 seconds of a nature documentary might be all it takes for me to settle in and learn more about horseshoe crabs.
Yeah but the older generations probably never even thought of watching a series in reverse order. You start with the last episode spoilers, but you don’t know why any of that is important.
Yeah, everything had to be self contained so it could be syndicated. Not so much now.
I always said Netflix should add a favorite shows category that you could play on shuffle (like Pandora radio)
It is really weird to be able to have all my shows in order. Shows like south park doesn’t matter as much since most of the episodes aren’t multipart, but the cartoon wars and episodes 200 and 201 were pretty awesome to watch back to back weeks live.
What I don’t miss are channels that put on Episode-marathons showing back-to-back episodes of a series. The multi-part episodes either air in the wrong sequence, or they don’t play those part-episodes at all.
Gotta love seeing a 3-part episodes with episode 3/3 to start, 1/3 comes next and 2/3 couldn’t make the cut in a 2+hr episode marithon.
Well, neither do I. When I was growing up the country only had two channels. The dull BBC-content-that-enriches-minds channel and the everything else channel.
Have you seen streaming services?
