I don’t know what kind of “package” you got or what ages your kids are, but we mostly watch the news and Nick Jr. at our house. I put pretty much everything on the DVR and watch nothing live. This gives me the opportunity to fast forward over commercials that I neither want to see nor want my children to see. I think the actual Nickelodeon channel is just too full of crappy commercials that my kids can’t watch it live (they’re 3 and almost 6, though, so maybe not an issue for your family). And thank goodness for OnDemand options!

I totally agree with USA and TNT having some great shows. I’m excited for some of the summer series that I wish were available in the fall and winter months.

FX has some good shows too.

We canceled our cable last year and I haven’t missed it. We get local channels plus ION and PBS over the air (in HD!) for free and I watch most things (including local news) online. Between hulu and Amazon I have everything I ever want. We watch Avatar on the Nickelodeon site for free, which is weird because you have to pay for it on Amazon, but it’s free a day later on Nick.

I found the first cable show I love to hate. Bridezilla on WE. Where do they find these girls? It is like a never-ending parade of selfish craziness. And a heck of a lot of the brides have been shacked up and already have kids with their grooms. Whatever happened to just going to City Hall and getting it done?

The best part of the show is the female voice-over who calls out the brides bad behavior. I wonder how the brides feel after its all over and they see the video of their nonsense. I would be beyond humiliated for my co-workers and neighbors to see what a brat I was.

I am laying bets on how long some of these marriages are gonna last. These guys are idiots for putting up with the drama.

Newsflash: Cody on Sisterwives has just announced they aren’t looking for another wife. 4 is enough. Whew! What a relief and Sisterwives is #2 on my eeewwww list of cable tv shows.

Thanks! I will check out your link. It will probably explain a lot about how your brain works. It is a mystery to me.

Stop that! It looks like I can’t spell (or type)! I love the home and garden channel. I enjoy House Hunters and extreme homes and stuff like that. Also the food channel. I also like The Little Couple and I used to really like uh…..what is the name of that show on TLC?—-Little People, Big World! Not because they were dwarves, but I found how they parented very interesting.

I also like “How I Survived” or maybe it’s just “I Survived.” And Celebrity Ghost Stories and “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant.”

But the shows I watch the most are on the regular channels. We don’t get the movie channels because they just show the same over and over. Except, I loved Boss, The Big C, and Homeland. All of which I’ve given up in repenting of watching bad stuff. But really well made.

My wife likes Gold Rush on Discovery and American Pickers on History. We both like Pawn Stars on History and I like Swamp People on History.

We have the basic starter cable package and we supposedly have 26 channels but out of those 26, five are spanish language programming and five are home shopping.

I love that you watched The Big C! Laura Linney rocks. I felt so guilty, though, I never let Bill know. Same with Homeland and Boss. I thought “why can’t they tell the story without the vulgar explicitness? If that’s even a word.

Ron, my husband likes Swamp People and Pawn Stars. I just can’t see the appeal there. My Sarah loves the Kardashians. It’s all I can do not to throw up.

I don’t like Ghost Hunters but Celebrity Ghost Stories gets pretty spooky. I think the spokkiest was Ricky Nelson’s daughter telling about his house. I can’t remember which debauched star he bought it from, but she’s convinced the ghost in that house caused her father’s death.

I believe in ghosts because I heard one once at my mother-in-law’s house. That and our beliefs in the nearness of the spirit world.

I live in SLC and have no antenna at all on my house, just a powered digital antenna on each TV. You have to realize that each broadcast channel now has about 2-3 subchannels. For example, KSL has a main channel and a subchannel that gets different programming and a subchannel that is only weather. I don’t watch many (or really any) of the subchannels, so the fact that I can get them, and the spanish channels, is really no benefit to me at all. I only ever watch the main network channels and the two PBS Channels, plus occasionally ION. Mostly though, I don’t watch them at all. I just watch the shows I like online.

A DVR is kind of like a VCR but without tapes. You can rewind “live” TV as long as you haven’t changed the channel more than once. And it can record a TON of stuff. I like that I don’t have to remember when shows come on. I just add them to my series recording options and the DVR records all new shows (or just all shows if you’re catching up on a series). You can jump forward or backward by a pre-determined lenght of time (something you’ll have to read the manual for) or just fast forward through anything you don’t want to see.

Honestly, I could probably live without “cable” (we have Verizon FiOS and I love it so much more than Comcast), but I would seriously miss my DVR. We record all sorts of things for the kids and they can watch them over and over without any help from us!

You’ll find it simpler than the old VCRs. The DVRs today have on-screen guides and the ability to search for shows. If you can spell, you’ll do fine! :)