There’s no easy or remotely excusable way to try to justify the neglect with which I’ve treated our relationship. I can only apologize and admit that the sheer abundance of your new programming is such that I must one again engage this medium in my rambling, amateurish analyses and giddy speculation. (I also need a venue for my writing that embraces my disgust for the serial comma.) And since no one episode or new series seems an appropriate catalyst to jump back in, I will start with a question. What the fuck am I supposed to do about Friday Night Lights?
Over the past months, I really haven’t given much thought to the vehicle for my beloved show’s third season. Confirmation of its persistence (however brief and unprofitable it will likely prove to be) is all I needed. But now, just a few hours off from its return, I have no easy way to watch it. No one has DirecTV—no one! I briefly considered signing up myself before coming to the conclusion that even my hatred of Time Warner Cable is no match for my fear of the unfamiliar. Waiting for NBC’s winter ’09 broadcast is out of the question, so I now prepare to settle for my dreaded nemesis, TV on the Internet.
“Why the hesitation?” you might ask. Well, for starters, it’s not available in glorious HD, it’s slightly amoral, and the purist in me tends to look down on it like a bastard conceived in the backseat of a cheap, foreign car. Plus, it’s totally complicated! These episodes aren’t going to show up on Hulu, you know. I’m going to have to search for them individually and play them on some application I probably don’t already have. To make matters worse, my 14 gigs of free hard drive and OS X “Panther” can’t even begin to entertain these new fangled torrents. And that doesn’t even solve the timeliness dilemma—there’ll be no protecting my vulnerable eyes and busy feed reader from spoilers!
So, what’s a boy to do, TV? I want to celebrate the fruits of your digital loins, but I don’t know how. Mikey needs his FNL.