Update: Love the show suggestions but please hor! DON'T POST BSG SPOILERS in my comments box! The wife and I haven't reached that far yet! Thank you.
The wife and I haven't been watching much regular TV lately. There is only this many badly-done Idol shows and copycats, local food shows (e.g. Good Food Stalls, Good Food Stalls Lost and Found, Good Food Stalls That Stayed Put...) and travel shows, that a human being can tolerate.
Furthermore, we never have time to follow any TV schedule any more. With kids to put to bed, long working hours, it is not even possible. And some years ago, we started to catch stuff on our own time, ploughing through TV series one DVD box set at a time.
One of the few series we watched non-stop was Tru Calling. It was about a girl, Tru, who worked in a morgue, who had the power to help dead people, and every time a dead person called out to her (very creepy moment), the day would reset, and she had a chance to help undo the events that led to these untimely deaths. The show lasted one and a half seasons (Season 2 only had 6 episodes done before it was canned). But we watched what we could get our hands on, and watched them all, ad-free, and on our own time.
Other series we got into were The 4400, Sex and the City, Band of Brothers, and Desperate Housewives. All watched on DVD, on our own time, commercial-free. Some we watch together (great bonding time), some we catch ourselves (I don't watch Desperate Housewives, she doesn't watch some of my anime).
Recently, we found time again to revisit our habit of watching shows we wanted to watch, on our own time. I got myself a portable media player, the Maxian T600, and I got her a Dvico Tvix M-3100U.
Both Korean products, the former gives me 30gb of space and a 4-inch widescreen LCD to watch anything I want, on the go. The other is a 300gb hard drive inside an enclosure that can connect to a TV via any of the standard TV ports (RCA, S-Video, Component), and plays just about any video file (music and images too) you want. That is for the missus.
We are not the most bleeding edge TV series watchers (we always catch stuff late) but dammit, Battlestar Galactica, our latest thing, is like the best thing ever to grace TV. The series is totally engaging, and even the missus is now hooked, though she was skeptical at first (she thought it was some shoot-them-up sci-fi thing). Even I was skeptical at first, because I was upset they made Starbuck a woman. After we watched episode 1, "33", it was "Wanna watch the next episode?". And we did. And another episode, and another. We only stopped for the night because of sleepiness.
When we are done with that, we will do Season 2 of it. Then maybe find some time for Firefly too.
Oh, and in between, there is always Youtube and random clips from the Net. And we have not even started watching P2P TV properly yet.
I am loading up an Archos Gmini 400 portable media player (20gb, 2.2-inch screen, slim and compact) soon so that the missus can watch her stuff in the commute home.
If you haven't tried BSG, you are missing out big time. Plus, Grace Park is a hot chick too.
Excerpt of an interesting piece on Battlestar Galactica:
October 18th, 2004 is the day TV died. That evening, British satellite broadcaster SkyOne — part of NEWS Corp's BSkyB satellite broadcasting service — ran the premiere episode of the re-visioned 70s camp classic Battlestar Galactica. (That episode, "33," is one of the best hours of drama ever written for television.) The production costs for Battlestar Galactica were underwritten by two broadcast partners: SkyOne in the UK, and the SciFi Channel in the USA. SciFi Channel programers had decided to wait until January 2005 (a slow month for American television) to begin airing the series, so three months would elapse between the airing of "33" in the UK, and its airing in the US. Or so it was thought.
