TV or not TV...

When Sean and I bought a house in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains nearly eight years ago, we knew when we moved in that we'd need cable television if we wanted any kind of decent TV reception. (Plus I had developed a dependency on Law & Order reruns and HGTV that I wasn't giving up without a fight to the death.) We had no choice but to go with the company that held the cable monopoly in our neighborhood, a giant but far from great corporation we didn't exactly love: their lineup was not stellar, the onscreen schedule frequently was on the fritz and had to be rebooted, and they were expensive. Still, gotta have cable, so we signed up.

A couple of years later a small new company somehow got their foot in the local cable door and offered us high-speed internet access and digital cable for only a little more than we were paying the behemoth. We happily switched over, although it meant relearning all the station numbers and dealing with the creepy new cable box that was so large we had to set it up on edge to make it fit in our wall unit. (Why was it so much bigger than the old cable box? we wondered. We joked that Homeland Security had installed a camera and voice recorder in the box, and we used to address the box directly and say hi to John Ashcroft.) All was well, and we liked supporting a small, new, independent company. Then, a couple of years ago, a different, somewhat larger company bought the little company, which made us sad in theory -- that the little guy couldn't or wouldn't try to make it in the cutthroat world of home cable installation -- but in practical terms didn't affect us at all; I think maybe we lost free HGTV-on-Demand, but eh, what are you gonna do.

Now we've found out that the crappy behemoth company has bought our medium-sized company and once again holds the monopoly in our neck of the woods. Dammit! They're going to cost quite a bit more than we have been paying, and the station lineup is going to change, and I'm going to have to relearn all those station numbers again. For about a millisecond I thought of canceling cable completely and setting up rabbit ears on the roof, but my life would be so much sadder without Turner Classics and the Food Network. (Not to mention those omnipresent L&O reruns.) The one plus the behemoth has is that it is now offering digital video recording, which appeals to me as I am too cheap to pay for TiVo and too lame to consistently get our DVD recorder to work properly.

Well, nothing is going to change in our cable world during the next week, because this week is the Fourth of July and we all know what that means: marathons! TNT is all Law & Order all the time -- although tell me how that's different from any other day of the week. Oh! is featuring a mini-marathon of Snapped. Turner Classics has an odd combo of Neil Simon comedies followed by films set during the Revolutionary War (including the lame Mel Gibson "epic" The Patriot -- blecchhh, when did that become a classic?). Bravo's got Project Runway all day, and the Discovery Channel is featuring Mythbusters. Biography is airing a spate of City Confidentials. And over on the SciFi Channel we've got my beloved Twilight Zone marathon: two days of shows, and OF COURSE they manage to schedule the best episode ever, "Living Doll," during my work shift on Tuesday.

All I need is a pitcher of Cape Cods and a remote, and I'm set. God bless America.