Slightly cheerier Usenet dredging

[womzilla]

Also from 2002:

On Wed, 25 Sep 2002 14:45:00 GMT, mikecap@TheWorld.com (Mike Caprio) wrote:
>People also watch The Sopranos faithfully... though I suppose that's a
>cable network so that might be a different thing entirely.

I suspect one of the reasons that the continuing-story shows are
moving to cable is that cable networks have a broadcast pattern which
is friendlier to such shows. Each episode of The Sopranos is broadcast
*five times* in its first week of release; if you miss it because
you're busy or there's a scheduling conflict or your VCR or cable
system screws up, you've got several more chances to catch it before
the next episode.

If you miss this week's West Wing, you're screwed unless a friend
taped it for you. IIRC, Fox broadcast each episode of 24 twice per
week over the air and at least once on their cable channel F/X. ABC's
Alias, which end every episode with a cliffhanger, rebroadcasts each
episode on *its* cable affiliate the next week. I think this is great.

The reason I find this amusing is that nellorat and I just spent a very pleasant hour watching this week's episode of CSI: (the real one, in Las Vegas). I indeed screwed up taping it on Thursday, but went onto BitTorrent, downloaded it while I was at work, and burned it onto a Video CD so we could watch it tonight. This is just plain better than TV, and I think this is the unstoppable wave of the future.

(We then finished with a cartoon--"Fry and the Slurm Factory", the final episode on the Futurama Season One DVD set. That's another huge improvement over television.)