HGTV

One of the streaming services we subscribe to is Discovery+. We use it like humans use their brains, i.e. only 10% of it¹, the only thing we watch is the stuff on the Food Network & HGTV. We also use it to watch the current episodes of our favorites using the streaming service to avoid commercials.

For the last year or so we have been watching an episode of Chopped when we sit down and eat. Chopped premiered in 2009 and continues to this day. According to Wikipedia they have filmed 674 (635 + 39 specials) and just last week we finished almost every one of them.

I say almost everyone because we have skipped pretty much all of the special or regular episodes that involved Alton Brown or Bobby Flay because we don’t particularly like either personality. Other shows we mostly avoided were the ones that Martha Stewart was involved in for the same reason, but we did put up with several, because she had wormed her way into becoming a judge for a half dozen seasons or so.

Not having anymore Chopped to watch, we have now switched to watching Guy’s Grocery Games. Wikipedia has not locked in its episode total yet and lists 256 or 270 as the total number of episodes, but they stopped really counting in 2019 and the show is still in production. Needless to say we probably have a years worth of dining entertainment lined up.

We each have our own set of favorite channels on the the TV and they fall pretty much along the stereotypical gender lines. I could live with just a few, Motortrend, MAVTV, NBCSports² and WE tv³. Donna needs literally just two, HGTV and the Food Network.

We both could do with out all the commercial interruptions while watching TV. I can tune mostly tune them, especially if I hit mute, but Donna really despises them. You would have thought we would have jumped on the Discovery+ streaming service when it first became available, but we held out. We are already spending a fair amount on cable TV and while the base rate of $5 a month isn’t much, it seemed a bridge too far. But when we discovered⁴ that they offered an ad-free version for just 2 bucks more we decided to give that 7 day free trail a go.

So far, two days in, the jury is still out. Very little of the Discovery+ originals have been worth anything extra, so whether we stick around after this coming Sunday is going to come down how long we can be entertained by watching the older shows from Donna’s favorite two channels.

I thought it might be fun to watch one of her favorite shows from the beginning and watch them in order, sort of like the Law & Order marathons on WE tv. Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives has 419 episodes, roughly the same amount as Law & Order’s 456, but if we did that what would we watch on Fridays because Food runs them all day long.

Today we went back and watched the first episode of Love It or List It from HGTV, their mere 154 episodes seemed less daunting. We are used to seeing the later episodes and were surprised how different everything was. The real big difference was instead of the two stars do the setup dialog, there was an announcer doing it, that sounded like the same voice that does House Hunters. Both leads had aged pretty well in the 8 years the show ran and looked only slightly different. When I asked out loud, “Aren’t they married?”⁵ Donna said no, but went to look it up on the internet. We discovered that they were not ever married to each other, but we did discover⁶ that the woman, Hillary Farr, was actually an actress back in the 70s & 80s. She even had a small part in that cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show.