TiVo's dark side

I've read a few different people discuss this before. Just so you don't think I'm stealing it, this is about as personal as you can get for a TV geek like me.

As I sit here writing to you, munching on some Cheerios, I'm watching The Daily Show. Nothing odd -- if you read more than one of my posts you know what kind of sense of humor I have. The unspoken subtext, though, is that it's the May 14 edition of the show. That's nearly two weeks old! And until last night I was stuck at about May 12 in my Daily Show/Colbert Report folders.

TiVo guilt is a painful thing. I love these two shows so much, but they're on four days a week. How do you keep up with that when there's so many other things to watch and a finite amount of time to do so. I've lucked out in that it's the end of the season and now I have time to play catch up.

Not only with Daily Show and Colbert, but with the four episodes of Painkiller Jane, the last Wedding Bells before cancellation, a couple episodes of Ugly Betty, and about half of Raines' run. There was no way I wanted to delete any of these shows, but they were on the bottom of the TV-watching importance scale. So they sat there waiting (some for months) and they've survived.

Not so for some others. I've had to purge Daily Show/Colbert episodes at least twice during the season. And I never got to see most of Discovery's Planet Earth because 12 episodes of beautifully-shot nonfiction doesn't live up to all the other crap I watch apparently. As I punished the delete button, I nearly shed a tear. Then I remembered DVDs.

How do you maintain a balance like that when you're recording, say, four hours of TV on a TiVo on a given night and only have time to watch two hours every day (you do the math, my TiVo's only 80 hours)? Give up on shows that sit around too long? Maybe. Stop recording shows that I only put on in the background while I'm writing or eating? Even better.

Keep recording and feel like crap every once in a while when you have to toss three weeks worth of Jon Stewart because there's no room for that new Pirate Master show? That's probably the most likely, but I'd need something a little more intriguing than Survivor on a pirate ship (or at least I'd like to say I would).

Maybe I shouldn't watch as much TV as I do to put me in such a position. That'd make the content on this blog more boring than it already is, and that's just not an option. That's make me feel even more guilty for abandoning my one or two readers. Eventually, they'll make Tivos that save everything on every channel for months (or the networks will just switch to OnDemand formats, which may just be the best move... especially if you're looking to combat TiVo ad-skipping). Until then I'll just start moving TiVo'd stuff over to my hard drive for safe keeping. I'll watch that episode of Wedding Bells in 2013.