My Kingdom for Reruns

I feel lost. Completely lost. Not lost with a capital letter at the beginning because I don’t watch that show. But that’s part of the reason I feel so lost.

TV season has ended. How will we carry on for the next few months?

For some reason, the whole thing snuck up on me. When I wrote a column a few weeks back about breaking up with Grey’s Anatomy, I didn’t realize that the end of the season was so close.

I might have hung on for a few more episodes if I knew the summer season would come so soon.

Remember when we loved this time of year because we could watch re-runs? We used that word around my daughter once, and she looked at us like we broke out in Chinese.

With the growth of syndication – something that rarely happened back in the day while the show was still on the air – and the ability to watch show online, there’s no novelty to running old episodes during the summer.

That means the networks, which have trouble coming up with good shows during the regular season, have to try and fill the void through the entire summer.

Most of the time, they fail, which is why I feel so bad about the regular TV season coming to a close. Not much that they manage to put on the air comes close to entertaining me the way my sitcoms do the rest of the year.

Part of this is because they try and mimic the horrible “reality”-based shows they produce during the other eight months, only this time they use the ideas that didn’t make the grade the first time.

Somehow, this has turned part of the summer television schedule on the networks into a big, honking talent show for the entire country. I’m still not sure how that passes for thrilling entertainment.

Some of the cable networks also have some shows that people have latched onto, but I haven’t yet made that leap. I might try and catch up on previous seasons for one or two of them this summer, but don’t know if I really want to commit that time.

Believe it or not, a pair of shows do manage to keep my attention. I’m a sucker for “Big Brother,” which is kind of like a less strenuous and more trashy version of “Survivor,” a show I never found interesting. I don’t know why I like one, but not the other.

Last summer, I added “Wipeout” to my viewing list. Watching people try and complete a bizarre obstacle course with the potential for disaster at every turn makes me laugh. It’s even funnier when you watch with a kid.

But those few hours a week can’t come close to making me miss Barney and Tracy and Dwight and Sheldon and Phil and Abed and Cameron and Brick. That doesn’t even get into the void created by no Ron Swanson.

I guess I could read. And spend time with my family. And enjoy the outdoors.

Can’t I just watch some re-runs instead?

Author

brian

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