Also, thanks to the practice of broadcast syndication, new series were often given at last 3-4 seasons to run even if the ratings weren’t great at first since it was more profitable to get the series to around 80 to 100 episodes then to cancel it early.

hoping for a pre season 10 episode of the simpsons at 7:30 and being disappointed.

I dunno. I find that enough movies and tv shows get chopped up into shorts and served to my fyp that it’s very similar to channel surfing sometimes. I feel like I’ve seen most of a few different movies served to me in random order with no context.

Yeah but the older generations probably never even thought of watching a series in reverse order. You start with the last episode spoilers, but you don’t know why any of that is important.

I always said Netflix should add a favorite shows category that you could play on shuffle (like Pandora radio)

Have you seen streaming services?

On the flip side they’ll not get to experience knowing that the channel you were watching was the exact same for everyone. It feels really strange and isolating to me to know that what’s on my TV right now is streaming just to me.

I know it’s silly; we were still watching TV alone, but there was something about knowing that other people were watching the same thing at the same time that made it better.

There was a charm to it, I discovered lots of programs from the randomness, one of which is my all time favourite doctor who (it caught me off guard as I saw what I now know was the third doctor Jon Pertwee being beaten up by Morris dancers). It’s the one thing I wish was integrated into streaming services. Just a ramdomiser button and it plays whatever.

Well, neither do I. When I was growing up the country only had two channels. The dull BBC-content-that-enriches-minds channel and the everything else channel.

It is really weird to be able to have all my shows in order. Shows like south park doesn’t matter as much since most of the episodes aren’t multipart, but the cartoon wars and episodes 200 and 201 were pretty awesome to watch back to back weeks live.

What I don’t miss are channels that put on Episode-marathons showing back-to-back episodes of a series. The multi-part episodes either air in the wrong sequence, or they don’t play those part-episodes at all.

Gotta love seeing a 3-part episodes with episode 3/3 to start, 1/3 comes next and 2/3 couldn’t make the cut in a 2+hr episode marithon.

I never would have expected to, but I miss channel surfing.

Now I get analysis paralysis flipping through a million thumbnails on various streaming services and I don’t see anything I want to commit to, but if I was channel surfing, 20 seconds of a nature documentary might be all it takes for me to settle in and learn more about horseshoe crabs.

They also don’t have the experience of only seeing half the episode because you were channel surfing, and not getting to see the rest of it until you catch another rerun two years later.

On my Plex server, I have several live streaming channels themed differently with an assortment of similar TV shows mixed together.

Even then, I’m not such a monster as to have them out of order!

Yeah, everything had to be self contained so it could be syndicated. Not so much now.