Am I Done With Broadcast Television?

I was sick all of yesterday (and am sadly still there today), and while I spent a good chunk of the day napping, the human body won't let you sleep that long so I also did what I normally do when I am sick: look at what has been clogging up my DVR, rest, watch an episode or two, and then head to another hour-long nap.  This involved me finishing up The Leftovers (I didn't realize until I was watching the finale that I had accidentally decided to finish the series on October 14th-fans of the show will understand the significance of that).

The show has received pretty universal acclaim, particularly as the series unfolded and we got to know the rest of the cast.  It's a wonderful study of the effects of grief and what a change in your perception can accomplish, and there's truly nothing else like it on television.  However, it did occasionally remind me of another Damon Lindelof show (the one with the island, I'm sure you remember it), and that got me to thinking: what has happened to broadcast television?

I'll admit that I'm not what you'd consider a TV fanboy.  I am a movie fanboy that does, of course, love television, but cinema is always number one in my book.  Still, though, because of proximity to my television I generally spend more of my time with a television series than a movie.  As a result, I have about fifteen shows in a given year that I'm "currently subscribed" to their series on my DVR.  However, I was checking after being blown away by The Leftovers, and I noticed that only six of those shows are on one of the Big 4 networks: Bob's Burgers, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, and Parks and Recreation.

That's it.  Just six, and the newest of the series just started its fifth season.  The reality is, as well, that most of these I'm watching more out of habit now than out of a yearning to see what happens next.  Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Girls, Looking, Veep-these are the shows that I rush to watch each week.  The only show that I feel the need to see immediately is Bob's Burgers, probably the best show currently on a broadcast network.  The others I catch on Saturday mornings while I am cleaning or when it's a Tuesday evening and I don't really have any other plans.  They almost always come in a binge-watching form, which for shows I love I cannot wait to watch (Game of Thrones and Looking, for example, I have to watch the night they air, if not live).

It's not like I haven't tried some of the other series.  I watched New Girl until I just couldn't take it (the characters are awful people).  Community and American Dad migrated to other networks.  I attempted four new shows this season, but came in with varying results.  Gracepoint got the click of the series manager button, but that's a miniseries and it will lucky if it airs all of the episodes of the series considering its low ratings (which is sad, because it's the first broadcast show in a long time that clearly felt like it knew how it would end).  The Flash seemed interesting, but my DVR kept cutting out and I didn't have the patience for the show, aside from Grant Gustin, who gives good charm and better abs, to try and find a different way to view it (you could see most of the plot points coming a mile away, and none of the supporting cast seemed particularly compelling).  The same could be said for Ben McKenzie and Gotham, which suffered a bit from having too many new characters (ooh, there's the Penguin!  Is that Poison Ivy?) in the opener and as a result dragged as it felt more like a cameo cavalcade than an actual program.  And the clumsy editing and cliched cast of characters outweighed my love of Viola Davis in How to Get Away with Murder-I'll put up with that for two hours in a movie, but not for eighteen hours in a season.

There was once a time when I couldn't get enough of broadcast television, particularly ABC.  Desperate Housewives, Lost, Pushing Daisies-these were shows that felt like they had a plan, had a purpose in where they were headed.  They felt, quite frankly, like the shows that HBO and AMC now host-they may have had less violence or sex, but they surely had a plan-of-action for where their series were headed (and shut up about the Lost finale, my main point is correct).  The comedies on network television still have their charms (cable has not been able to master the straight-up comedy in the same way as broadcast TV can, but with something like Veep they're clearly getting closer), but most of the more charming ones are aging pretty rapidly.  Parks and Rec will be entering its final season this year, and you can feel Seth MacFarlane and Matt Groening starting to hit their respective shows' bucket lists right about now, getting ready for FOX animation domination to trail into the abyss.

I will admit I don't watch all of the critically-acclaimed television programs on broadcast TV.  The Good Wife, Scandal, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine have all enjoyed strong critical reviews in the past few years, and maybe I should give one of them a shot, but I don't do serials, HTGAWM has kind of poisoned me on Shonda Rhimes programming for the time being, and Andy Samberg/Andre Braugher are not my favorite performers.

So I ask-are you also done with broadcast television?  I've written here about how they could fix the channels, but why don't you think that broadcast TV networks cannot figure out how to create content to bring back the cable viewers?  Share your thoughts in the comments!