Dave Rickey has something to say about the panic that television executives are feeling about the rise of computer games as an alternative life diversion. By his count, MMO players who used to watch the 28 hours of TV that most people watch now play MMOs for 20 hours a week and watch TV for 8. Which is to say, they’re not necessarily socially more degenerative than the norm. Hell, they’re the ones actually interacting with other people!

All that being said, I’m watching too much TV right now. Getting a DVR will do this to you. I go through phases with hobbies, and currently, I’m playing MTGO on a laptop while my fiance watches TV. A DVR helps a lot – erasing the commercials makes it much easier to justify wasting any amount of your life on TV. Here’s what I’m watching.

Good Television

  • Arrested Development.It was slow in starting, but now has hit its stride, and is probably the funniest thing on television.
  • Scrubs. Strange, surreal, and funny.
  • The Daily Show. A useful reminder that I’m not alone in wondering what the hell is wrong with people.
  • CSI.Original Flavor, accept no substitutes.
  • Numb3rs. A surprisingly good show about using math to solve cases. Appeals to my inner geek, but you can already see them start stretching to come up with math-related crimes.
  • House. Makes you desperately wish that you were so smart that you could be a total asshole and still keep your job.
  • Lost. The best water cooler show since the X-files.

Shows on the Bubble

  • West Wing. This show used to be really smart and sassy, but lately has become plagued by monumentally stupid sub-plots. An asteroid’s heading towards earth. What will the president do — wait, he can’t do anything! Well, good thing that the asteroid passed us by without any threat!
  • Deadwood. Last season was exceptional. This season, they apparently have been focusing on replacing all of the profanity with flowery prose. If I wanted flowery prose, I’d go watch Shakespeare in the Park.
  • South Park. Only every third episode is any good, and that ratio is falling.
  • 24. The first season was great. Since then, they’ve had moments of brilliance surrounded by lots of mediocrity and backbending to get you to believe that all of this is possible in a 24 hour period of time.

So that would be 10.5 hours of television a week, by my count (with commercials!). Dear god, are you telling me that non-gamers actually watch 3 times as much TV as that? What on earth are they watching?

Bad TV that we sometimes watch when we hate ourselves:

  • CSI: Miami. Watching Caruso overact is so bad it’s good. You can’t imagine how hard it is to convince people of this.
  • Law and Order Criminal Intent. “We know he did it, but we can’t find any evidence. Let’s send in D’Onofrio to mindjob a confession out of him.”
  • CSI: New York. It started off as ‘CSI – only dark’. Apparently, that was too dark, so now they’ve migrated to ‘CSI – only boring’.
  • Without A Trace. I have no idea why we continue Tivo’ing this show.
  • Medical Investigation. This show is so bad that I think its fanbase is entirely comprised of people who like cutting themselves. The worst writing you’ll find on television.

So even if you throw in the stuff that I only watch when I’m desperate, I only watch half as much television as the average person. What’s wrong with you people?