Off-the-Beaten-Path Television

Like most modern Americans, we subscribe to a service that provides our television programming. We use DirectTV because it is the only way for North Carolinians to get Baltimore Oriole games. Don't ask, just accept that it is a sickness and that I will probably never be cured.

DirectTV provides us with roughly ten million channels of programming. Most of what's broadcast is wholly worth ignoring, but with ten million channels something good is bound to be on every once in a while, right? The question is, how do you find good programming among ten million channels worth of (mostly) drek?

I'm going to do my best to help you here. Now, I know you do not need my help to find your way to Law and Order reruns. In fact, I assume you are watching one right now, as you are reading my blog. You are, right? Not such a lucky guess; the odds are in my favor.

No, I'm talking about stuff that runs on channels you don't even know you have. Programs that you therefore don't know exist, yet which are really, really good, even better than Law and Order reruns. For example:

Ninja Warrior, G4--On one level, this is just a goofy obstacle-course competition. But the great thing about it is, it's a Japanese obstacle-course competition, and Japanese television is awesome. The announcer sounds like a very angry Toshiro Mifune, growl-shouting play-by-play (thankfully the show is broadcast in Japanese with subtitles, not in some lame dubbed version like Iron Chef). Competitors behave as if this competition is the only thing that has ever mattered--or ever will matter--in their entire lives.

then there's

Nothing But Trailers, HDNet--Admit it, you don't go to the movies any more. You can't stand paying $10 to see something you can watch on your bigass TV at home for free in just a few months, you can't stand paying $7 for a vat of greasy day-old popcorn, and you really can't stand all the morons around you who are either yelling at each other or at the movie screen or into their cell phones, which if there's a God in heaven will be eternally and painfully inserted into their recta for the endurance of the Afterlife. But... you miss seeing trailers, which are so often the best part of the moviegoing experience. HDNet has your back, baby: one half hour of nothing but trailers. Crank up the home entertainment center until the furniture rumbles. It's exactly like being at a movie theater, minus the morons.

finally, there's

Prime Minister's Questions, CSPAN--OK, I have to admit that I haven't seen this since Tony Blair stepped down, so I have no idea if it's still the great program it was back in the day. Question Time, for those unfamiliar, is when Britain's leader comes to Parliament to answer a bunch of questions--some softballs, some incredibly pointed, depending of course on who is asking--from 'backbenchers' (i.e. not Ministers) in the House of Commons. Blair was a master of the format; he handled it like Plato deconstructing the Sophists. He answered so firmly, so authoritatively, so confidently that you couldn't shake the feeling that you agreed with everything he had just said, even when you were quite certain that you adamantly did not agree with anything he'd just said. Great theater, and something that is sorely lacking from the American form of government. Seriously, how great would it be for George W. Bush to have to take questions from the likes of Jerrold Nadler and Dennis Kucinich for a half hour every single week? I bet Bush would've been a one-term-and-out president, a compelling enough argument on its own to institute President's Questions right here in the U S of A.