TV

Hulu Hoops

With football season just around the corner it was time to start thinking about how we were going to get the local channels after cutting half the cord back in February.

To get those football games we had the option of going with either YouTube TV or Hulu. In the end we chose Hulu because for about the same price as YouTube they were offering a bundle that included Disney+ and ESPN+ to go along with that Live TV.

ESPN+ I’m not too sure about, but Disney+ is going to be a treasure chest full of promising stuff. All the Star Wars stuff, the old movies and the new original TV content and the whole Marvel Universe of movies and TV as well.

Hulu has a couple of original series that I’ve heard good things about, but have never seen. Like Only Murders in the Building and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Another big draw to Hulu was it was the home of FX which has a couple of shows I’ve seen and would like to watch again Justified and Better Things. FX also has a few newer shows that sound promising, like Mr Inbetween, Reservation Dogs and The Old Man.

Ted Lasso Erases A Week Of My Life

In a couple of day’s ago post I mentioned watching the Red Sox playing on MLBTV. Well, one of the commercials in between innings was an offer for a 2 month free trial of Apple TV+. I had the commercial on mute, so I didn’t hear what they were on about, but I thought, “Hmmm, I’ve wanted to check Apple TV+, but never pulled the trigger for one reason or another. This looks a pretty good deal.”

So, I went to apple.co/mlbgift and signed up (offer is good until July 7th if you are interested.) Turns out the reason is that Apple TV+ has the rights to one Friday night baseball game, chosen by MLB maybe, for the season and they also have a 30 minute nightly MLB recap. I have not bothered with the recap show, but I did watch an inning or two of last Friday’s Dodgers Cardinals game. I may keep and eye out for Red Sox game on Fridays between now and June 24th when my free trial ends.

So, anyway, the first show I wanted to check out was this Ted Lasso show all the cool people were talking about. Tuesday night the 18th I watched Season 1 Episode 1. I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about, it seemed like just another fish out of water story and Jason Sudeikis’s character seemed too broadly drawn and the accent was kind of over the top. I wasn’t going to watch anymore, but as I was talking to Donna about it, I suggested watching Episode 2 on Wednesday at lunch and if she seemed interested we would watch the show together.

She was not interested, so I figured that was that. Later that afternoon, with nothing else going on I thought, let me watch episode three and if I don’t get into it, I’ll move on. After that third show I watched the fourth. I got interested in the arcs of the cast of characters that surround out titular hero and I am a lover of listening to the accents when the Queen’s English is spoken. And I’d become used to the Ted Lasso character.

On Thursday I watched the next four episodes, this left only two episodes of the first season for Friday which lead to rolling right into season two. The only time I came up for air over the the weekend was Sunday night to watch Thursday’s new episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel my previous favorite show.

Sometime on Tuesday I ran out of episodes when I finished episode 6 of season three. So now I had to wait until the next day for Apple TV+ to release the next show and after that I’d stuck waiting a whole week between new episodes. I briefly considered waiting for 6 weeks so I could binge those last set of season three’s shows, but couldn’t do it, I watched episode seven the next day when it became available.

It Works

Two weeks ago I found out that the FRS were the free game of the day on MLBTV, so I thought I’d tune in. They were in last place in the division at 5 wins and 6 loses, but hey it’s still early in the season. I just looked today and currently the Red Sox are 13 & 13 and still in last place in the division, two games behind the Yankees and eight behind the division leading Tampa Bay Rays. Oh. well, wait’ll next year.

Plus I also wanted to see a game and check on how the whole pitch clock thing was working out. I’m not sure how the players like the clock, but according to a Bleacher Report article, MLB says it has knocked an average of 26 minutes from game times. Wow. The game I watched with the Angels still went almost 3 hours, but hey, it could have been nearly 3-1/2 hours.

I scanned back several games and found that several of their games have been just a few minutes over two and a half hours. This means that if I was still back on the east coast those 7:10 PM starts would be ending at a sensible half past ten. This pitch clock thing might have even prevented those games against their arch rivals the Yankees running to nearly midnight. And if I remember, I’ll see how long the games against New York when they play them on back to back weekends in early June.

Thursday Is The New Friday

According to Amazon, Season 5 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was supposed to start on Friday, April 14th, but I just finished watching Episode 1. I’ve run into this before on Amazon Prime, with Season 4 of this show, as well as Season 1 of Reacher last year too. My theory is that it is a time zone thing, it is already tomorrow in Europe (and it is also almost tomorrow on the East Coast right now too), but who knows.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago IMDB had nine episodes listed for this season, but no real dates on the episodes except for April 14, 2023 for the first. I wondered how they would show each episode, and if IMDB is correct, we get all of the first three episodes this week and the following six will come out one at a time every “Friday” until the show finale on May 26th.

I’ve watched episode one and I wonder if I can stretch out the other two episodes during this week gap, say every other day, so as to bridge the gap until episode four next “Friday.” Oh, who am I kidding, I’ll probably watch them tomorrow morning…

Watching Family Trees Grow

Donna and I have been a big fan of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s show on PBS called Finding Your Roots for quite a while. While it is fun to dig into the family trees of actors, musicians and other famous people, it always come with an interesting history lesson that a member of their family was directly involved in.

Because we have a subscription to Peacock so we can watch bicycle racing we were pleasantly surprised to stumble on a show on it called Who Do You Think You Are?. It is pretty much the same thing as Finding Your Roots except is from NBC and sponsored by Ancestry.com.

The PBS version is a nicer shop to watch because there are no interruptions for commercials and it will usually follow both sides of the person’s lineage back. The NBC version usually just picks one branch to chase back and while we don’t get commercials (we subscribe to the add-free level), we still get the 4 or 5 interruptions, with the title cards where commercials were, along with some sort of “cliff hanger” before and the repeat of when we get back.

After watching the 6 episodes of Season 1 of the show on Peacock and because the copyright date at the end of the last show was MMXX (aka: 2020), Donna asked, “I wonder if they are going to make more?” So I headed off to IMDB to see if there were any more. Turns out there are 85 total episodes over 12 seasons of the show. Not only that, but the “season 1” we watched on Peacock was actually season 12, the last one listed on IMDB.

A bit of poking around led to the discovery (pun intended) that the show aired for several years on TLC. Wait a minute, I’ve seen TLC listed on the Discovery+ streaming service we also subscribe to. Sure enough, we could watch more of the show, Discovery+ had seasons 4 thru 10. We had already seen 12 on Peacock, so where were seasons 1,2,3 and 11?

Adding up the total episodes from each season listed on Discovery+ for seasons 4 thru 10 comes up at 49. I then counted the episodes on IMDB for seasons 4 thru 11 and the total episodes was 49 again. The seasons on IMDB and Discovery+ didn’t line up, the quantity of episodes per each season were different and some shows were listed in different seasons.

So I tried a third source, Wikipedia. I counted episodes from season 4 to 10, because this source called season 11 what IMDB called 12 and Peacock called season 1, confused, me too. Anyway Wikipedia’s total was 52! I went through the list and found the 3 missing episodes, J.K. Rowling, Minnie Driver and Jim Parsons.

Also on Wikipedia I learned that seasons 1, 2 & 3 of the show were originally broadcast on NBC. Hello? Peacock is the streaming arm of NBC, why aren’t they available there?

Times Miata Driven since 10/28/22: 10

 

The Consultant

With apologies to the Addams Family:

He’s creepy and he’s kooky
Mysterious and spooky
He’s all together ooky
The Consultant

Usually I know what is coming up on Amazon Prime, but I didn’t know about this show at all. When poking around on Saturday for something to watch one of the banners for was something called “The Consultant.” I went to its Amazon page and saw just 8 episodes clocking in around 30 minutes each. Intrigued I went to its IMDB page to see what kind of rating it had. It was only a 6.6 out of 10, but I could spare 30 minute for episode one. The next time I looked up I had finished episode six!

It was getting late and I didn’t have time to finish the last two episodes, so I watched them today. In the last episode they basically teed up for a season two. While I certainly enjoyed watching the show and I don’t regret spending roughly 4 hours watching it, I probably won’t watch another season of it.

Cutting Half the Cord

A little cable bill history. Back in Aiken ten years ago, which is the furthest back I can find a bill, we were paying $62 a month for their cable service. In 2016 our bill jumped from $83 to $145 because we dropped AT&T’s DSL internet service for the speedier cable internet. Two years later it went from $164 down to ninety-five bucks because we dropped down to the very basic TV service. We had had probably 100 channels previously, but watched a half dozen of them. This cheaper option gave us what we really needed, just the big 4 networks, PBS and the Weather Channel. By the time we moved west it was up to a few bucks over the hundred dollar mark.

When we moved in here in Oregon we signed up with Spectrum. In 2020 for 125 channels and 500MBs internet speeds it was $134 a month. Because that was an introductory price it creeped up to $215 by this year. There was something about breaking the two hundred dollar that made it seem like that was too much for what we were getting.

Unlike Atlantic Broadband in Aiken, Spectrum’s 125 channel package is the lowest they offer. This is too bad because if they did offer a lower tier and we could save forty or so dollars, we’d have happily stayed. Again, all we really needed were the regular broadcast channels and ESPN for watching NFL football games. The day after the Super Bowl we drove down to the local Spectrum store, handed them their box and remote. The next bill we get from them will be a more reasonable $89 for their 1 Gig internet.

We have had a Roku box for about ten years that delivers all of our non-cable video entertainment. We’ve been paying $6.99 for the ad-free version of Discovery+ for HGTV & Food Network. Plus another $9.99 for Peacock Premium+ (ad-free) and a little over $4 a month more for GCN+ for watching pro cycling.

Probably the two most used apps on the Roku are Radio Paradise and YouTube.

If we we’re just reading a book or doing a jigsaw puzzle RP’s music was on in the background. Because Radio Paradise is listener supported I’ve been donating $5 a month to them for quite so time now. After the cable TV cancelation I bumped up that reoccurring donation to $10.

Whenever I watch car related stuff on YouTube on the PC I never get commercials, but when Donna watches it via the Roku on the TV she was getting a lot of very annoying ads mid video, so we have upped to YouTube Premium for $11.99 a month so she is much happier (and consequently so am I.)

What about NFL football when it starts back up in September? Where we live there isn’t a strong enough signal from the networks to just add a small indoor antenna, plus what about Monday Night Football on ESPN? Glad you asked. The cost savings from eliminating cable TV is roughly the equivalent of half the cost of YouTube TV or Hulu, both of which offer local broadcast stations and ESPN.