Popular TV shows you didn't watch

[thenetwork]

Pokemon - The show was on a channel I never watched. The games were for a system I didn't own. The cards I never sought since I was already busy collecting baseball cards. So the whole "Pokemon Fever" craze never got too much of a hold of me.

The game was good*, the cards and TV show nonsense. Maybe I was too old - my brother was well into the cards and TV show because he was 10-11 when they came out, rather than 14-15.
[/quote]

I never understood the popularity of Manga or "Japanimation" cartoons on TV.  Even going back to the 60's when you had the original "Speed Racer" and "Kimba", the animation was always choppy and, due to language translation, the voice dubs never matched the mouth movements. 

I'll take most Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers cartoons over that imported junk any day. 

[J N Winkler]

Looking over the past page or so of comments, I see that many different styles of TV viewing are represented, so let me comment on my own.

I lost my hearing at age four, so I depend on subtitling or closed captioning to make sense of TV.  I had no awareness that sitcoms had laugh tracks (which are not subtitled) until this was explained to me after an episode of The Golden Girls.

The Internet and optical media have comprised nearly the totality of my delivery mechanism for TV content for 17 years now.  I am usually not even aware of the day of the week or the time a show is broadcast, unless I am following it episode-to-episode and need to know when a new episode is out of embargo.  In general I reject the concept of appointment TV.

I actually have an old analog TV and VCR setup in front of my reading/TV watching chair, but have not turned either on in probably five years.  The appliances sit there unused because when I sit down in the chair, reading a book or watching a TV series episode wins out over furniture rearrangement 99.9% of the time.  The TV probably still gets a signal, but I don't know for how much longer that will be true since the cable company has recently sent us a circular announcing impending analog shutoff.  I don't really understand how digital channel numbering works, and have no real interest in learning, but will probably get around to it if only to stave off social exclusion and to maintain small-scale, residual TV reception capability for tornadoes and other emergencies.

I have turned against TV news because I have seen the effect it has on a family member who suffers from anxiety.  I go away when the news comes on, and stay in touch with current events through Slate, the Washington Post online, and occasionally Vox, the New York Times, the Guardian (the last for UK news much more often than US news), and the Wichita Eagle both in paper (we do our bit to keep it going) and online for local coverage.

I have very little interest in nonfiction TV formats.  Documentaries:  why am I not reading this in a book or magazine?  Cooking shows:  shouldn't I be using Rombauer & Becker or Cooks.com instead?  Reality shows:  the less said the better (it actually took me about five or six years after Endemol took off to understand why they couldn't casually be dismissed as "porn for those too prudish to look at real porn").  Game shows:  I used to walk past the TV while Jeopardy was on, but was never a committed fan, largely because I usually felt there was something else I should be doing with my time.  How-to TV:  this has now largely been replaced by YouTube, which often has how-tos tailored to model-specific applications.

I almost never discover a new show by turning on the TV when it happens to be playing--in fact, I cannot remember the last show I found in this way.  Usually I go by recommendations from friends, from the media (often from mainstream coverage once a show becomes a hit, rather than the TV critics), and sometimes by searching for the other shows of a favored actor.  I screen possible shows by looking them up in Wikipedia and on review aggregator sites like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes.  I give a show three episodes to set the hook firmly before I proceed with it--often I find the pilot is quite strong while the next two episodes are foot-tappers.

In the film/film criticism world, there is a concept called "patient cinema":  films that by and large do not rivet their viewers to their seats, but are considered artistically valuable since they say something compelling about a big theme like the Zeitgeist, relations between women and men, and so on.  There is something analogous in TV, and shows like Mad Men fall into this category.  The real pleasure of watching Mad Men, as I have discovered by dipping into individual episodes in a DVD set checked out from the public library, is the set and costume design and the side references to planning disasters like the Penn Station redevelopment in the mid-1960's.  Breaking Bad, on the other hand, manages the unusual feat of being both suspenseful and serious.

When I was growing up, one of our family friends was a retired theatre professor who, in his youth, had taken in several seasons of opera at the Met as an usher.  He used to speak of "looking at" TV, instead of "watching" it.  At first I thought this was a snobbish evasion:  if you sit down in a chair to pay attention to the TV while it is playing, how is this not watching TV?  But as I have gotten older, I have come to appreciate that there is a second meaning.  There is far more TV out there than any one person can watch in a lifetime, much of it is filler, and even the good shows--the ones a person gets into, whether or not they say something important about the human condition, or are produced well--demand a significant time commitment for end-to-end viewing.  "Looking at" instead of "watching" hedges against a bad investment in time or attention.

So, for me Mad Men is well worth "looking at"; as for "watching," we'll see.

[ET21]

Lost, The Voice, American Idol

[bing101]

House of Cards.

[Big John]

On a same line, was not allowed to watch Dallas or Soap, though i watch Soap later on as reruns, likely controversial due to the openly gay character at that time.

[tribar]

Practically anything.  Most shows today are garbage.

[cjk374]

Seinfeld:  my siblings loved it, I never laughed one moment. What the hell was that crap??

Reality shows ain't real!! Once you understand that simple concept, your life will be so much better.

I  don't have HBO or Skinemax, so any of those shows I haven't a clue what they had on TV.

I haven't watched any of the Simpson's, Family Guy, or American Dad.

[DandyDan]

Just about everything that was new in 1997 or later.  I did eventually get every season of Lost on DVD, but for many of the shows since then, I got the first season DVD, decided it didn't interest me and traded it in for something else at Half Price Books, or this other store they have in the Omaha area called Tradepost.

[PHLBOS]

The guy in that photo you posted (flipping the bird) looks a bit like (the original) Eddie Munster (Butch Patrick).

[xcellntbuy]

I have had no television since July 2006 so I have missed a great deal of the vast wasteland.

[nexus73]

Seinfeld.  Never was a sitcom kind of person.

Rick

[J N Winkler]

Just about everything that was new in 1997 or later.  I did eventually get every season of Lost on DVD, but for many of the shows since then, I got the first season DVD, decided it didn't interest me and traded it in for something else at Half Price Books, or this other store they have in the Omaha area called Tradepost.

We have Tradepost down here too.  Personally, the only TV series I actually own on DVD are Firefly and The X-Files.  For everything else I use the public library or the Internet.  My problem with facilitated exchange places like Tradepost is that their prices seem, on the whole, uncompetitive with Amazon, and the difference between the buy and sell price amounts to a rental fee, which I am generally unwilling to pay for content that was originally free over the air (I consider the time cost of faffing with a DVD, with its unskippable tracks, constrained menu navigation, and so on, to be comparable to that of the TV commercials).

[bugo]

Seinfeld:  my siblings loved it, I never laughed one moment. What the hell was that crap??

Curb Your Enthusiasm is way funnier than Seinfeld. Larry David is hilarious.