2/01/2009

Surviving the Super Bowl with No TV

Some of you already know that Casa TILNEYandRYAN is a television-free zone. Like when you dropped by unexpectedly to watch the Oscars last year, only to discover that we had ditched cable.

"No matter," you said. "We'll just adjust the rabbit ears... Wait, you have no rabbit ears? What is with you people?! You don't *look* Amish!"

The thing about the rabbit ears is, it wouldn't have mattered even if we *did* have them: Our house was built in 1905, and the architect had the foresight to insulate our home with a protective lead barrier. It's hell on cell phone signals.

Why on earth did we choose to live a TV-free life? Did someone lose a bet? Are we making a political statement?

Not exactly. When we moved from Madison to Milwaukee in 2006, we discussed continuing our cable subscription. But really we only watched a handful of channels: Comedy Central for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Discovery Channel for Mythbusters, Bravo for Project Runway, CNN for that fetching news ticker at the bottom of the screen, which we understood they've recently removed -- pity, and TNT for our daily five-hour dose of Law & Order (the original version -- none of this Vincent D'Onofrio sees dead people crap).

Anyhoo, we thought of all those commercials we had to sit through. We thought of how the History Channel was really losing its grip, in that it seems to consider "history" to consist mainly of WWII Nazi gold mysteries and documentaries on alien abductions. The History Channel, people! We thought: We can do better than this! As for news, we can read (or watch) it online. We subscribe to good magazines that keep us up to date with the really important news, and for really timely news, we listen to NPR.

So we ditched cable and increased our Netflix subscription from 3 at a time to 5 at a time, and lately to 7 at a time because there are still some nights when we are without DVDs to watch. We are still able to catch all our favorite shows (commercial-free, no less)...it's just that we're one year behind what's currently being broadcast. So don't, for the love of God, tell me what happened this week on Lost!

Still, there are a few days out of the year when we miss watching live TV. Today is one of those days. So we are heading a few blocks down the street to The Chancery, our local pub, to watch us some football!

Besides Super Bowl Sunday, what days of the year do you thank your lucky stars you have a TV (or wish you had one)? Share your must-watch TV events in the comments.

Image credit: Tot Snob

2 comments:

Cindy said...

I suppose it's not exactly the same thing, but I sure was glad to be able to have access to American tv on Election Day. I probably could have caught the key information on the internet the next day, but boy I sure was glad to be able to watch Obama's acceptance speech live at about 5 am Italy time!!! I got caught up in the moment of watching it WHILE it was happening...

Jean said...

I have been known to throw Oscars parties, but not Superbowl parties. The fashion! The silliness!