Saturday Morning Disappointment
It’s Saturday morning as I write this, and I am feeling somewhat bereft. Only after I picked up my tablet (it spends the night next to my pillow) and tapped the Disney+ app did I remember that there wasn’t a new episode of Doctor Who today.
And then I remembered that this was precisely the sort of thing that the internet and streaming video was supposed to save us from. But here I am, waiting for episodes of The Boys and Criminal Minds and Abbott Elementary and The Acolyte, and frankly I’m so bad at keeping track that it’s entirely possible that some of those are finished.
Sometimes I think that I’ve finished watching something, only to have a new episode pop up … and sometimes, like this morning, I will think that there’s a new episode of something that’s gone away. Quite why this bothers me so much I have difficulty putting in words.
After all, I should be used to it. There are plenty of shows that I haven’t watched all of, because I only caught them sporadically when they aired … if they aired at all, because there was no guarantee that the single free-to-air English language television channel that we had in SIngapore when I was little would show every season.
I’m a child of television, although my birth pre-dates the availability of colour television in Singapore by three years. Even after shows were broadcast in colour, it wasn’t common to have a colour television: the second tv set in our house was a small black and white, and that was a luxury in and of itself.
(It boggled the mind that any home would need more than one television. Everyone watched everything together, after all, and talked about it with their friends at work or school the next day.)
I could write an entire book about how tv-watching has changed my lifetime, had I the patience. But as it is I bristle at the (frankly cheap) tactic of streaming platforms releasing shows weekly, to encourage people to subscribe for more than a month at a time.
I would, honestly, except that now there are so many (even here!) that the cost is prohibitive. Even a single streaming platform costs more per year than the annual television license used to be, and you still have to watch advertisements on some of them. It hasn’t quite matched what I used to pay for cable television, but at least with the latter I got free-to-air television for … well, for free.