Confession Tuesday

In honor of the delightfully talented January O’Neil of Poet Mom, who posts a weekly Tuesday confession, I am offering this confession, although with an ulterior motive.

I have a confession to make, and it may embarrass me or change the way you think about me, but I need to get it out.  I watch a TV show called Switched at Birth, a show as overwrought and emotionally manipulative as Hollywood can devise.  I discovered the program when ABC Family Channel posted the first two episodes for free on iTunes last year.  The show was cheesy, but intriguing, and once I showed the episodes to my wife, we decided to follow the show.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find it on ABC Family’s schedule.  I suspect that the show’s time slot conflicted with one of the few other shows we follow, so we missed the next several episodes.  After a few weeks, we decided to catch up on the show by watching the episodes we had missed by accessing it on Comcast Cable’s OnDemand service.  No such luck.  We turned to Hulu, but only the most recent episode, number 7, was posted there.  This left me with three choices: watch the most recent episode and hope I can catch on to what is happening despite missing five episodes, buy the missing episodes on iTunes despite the fact that I know I don’t like the show enough to want to own those episodes, or stop watching the show.

I chose to stop watching.  Hollywood’s bizarre obsession with controlling how and when I can watch what I want instead of letting me stream it (with commercials, mind you) convinced a willing viewer to give up on a show.  Rather than treating streaming as an option of equal value as timed presentations on television, Hollywood sees it as a barely tolerable evil, apparently.  Just as I suspect they see iTunes sales as a barely tolerable alternative to DVD sales.

There are those who might argue that I had a fourth choice.  I could pirate the show from a torrent site.  So far, I have avoided doing this for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that both my wife, a member of SAG, and I are artists, and I am well aware of the fact that actors, writers, directors live off the residuals provided by legitimate movie and TV show streaming and purchases.  While most people think of screwing the industry moguls before getting screwed by them, I think of the little guy.    The Oatmeal presents a sad yet reasonable argument for this option for a show that is not available anywhere but cable, even iTunes, but that doesn’t work for me.  Also, I worry about downloading infected files.

The story of my obsession with Switched at Birth does have a happy middle, though.  Shortly before the second season was scheduled to premiere this past January, the network released the first season to Netflix.  My wife and I streamed the eight episodes we missed and/or skipped over three days during the week between Christmas and New Year, and were happily caught up.  This is the best of all worlds.  We can watch whatever show we want whenever we want it, and usually turn it into a marathon event.  Not that this should be perceived as an endorsement of Netflix.  They’ve got plenty of issues of their own, but at least they want to make money by giving me, the consumer what I want, even if the selection available is spotty at best.

This season, however, Switched at Birth is on TV at the same time as Glee.  And yes, I am a married, heterosexual man who watches both Switched at Birth and Glee.  Sue me.  The choice has now become which one to watch on the night the networks picked, and which one to try to catch later in the week on Hulu or OnDemand.  We chose to watch Switched at Birth on Tuesday nights due to the difficulty we had last season finding legitimate alternate methods of watching the show, and the fact that we had had success catching up on Hulu on the odd Glee episode missed due to stuff going on in our lives over the first two seasons.  So what happens?  Fox suddenly changes the rules for Glee and institutes an eight day waiting period before episodes are available on Hulu without a Hulu Plus subscription, which still has commercials by the way.  Thanks, Fox.  I now have to wait longer to stream an episode of Glee (with commercials) than I would have to wait to buy a gun.  Of course, then I might need to post a confession of a different kind.