… or, “What’s been clogging our TiVo this summer.”

The whole notion of a “summer TV season” is relatively new. When this post stands the tests of time and is read years from now by the generation below us, that statement will seem crazy, but it’s true. For the vast majority of my life, all television series started in September, ran through May, and showed reruns throughout the summer. It was a time to catch up on missed episodes,  start up a missed series, to be ready for the next season, come September, or spend long evenings outside. My, how things have changed since Survivor monkeyed around with the formula back in 2000.

For one thing, I can’t imagine a network using a word like “rerun” or “repeat” any more. Now we are faced with “recap”, “highlight”, and “classic” episodes: basically, old material slightly repackaged to trick us while we play with our smartphones anyway. This trend was disturbingly familiar this summer on NBC, which airs a few of my annual favorites. The worst offender of the three was Last Comic Standing. I love this show, which gives viewers without basic cable a rare opportunity to watch stand-up comedy, and many of the comics are outstanding. But, they were sneaky this year. Rather than admit that they didn’t buy enough series to cover these months and then show legitimate repeats, NBC found a clever way to trick DVR’s set to record only new episodes by repackaging material into clip shows (a practice that would only surface after several seasons of new episodes back in the day), such that we were expected to watch certain stand-up routines four or five times in the span of just a few weeks. There was the first time we heard a set, followed a week later by “The 10 best jokes of the season” and then “The 20 best jokes of the season”, etc. By the end, it wasn’t even clear what was new material, and whether or not I’d missed anything while fast-forwarding through the “classic” jokes.

America’s Got Talent had the advantage, at least, of the traditional cut-down episode each week. It still is a sneaky way to land an extra episode in the top 10 , but I can understand it more, and with a bit of clever DVR programming, it’s possible to skip recording of these episodes. But, as best I can tell, there were a few weeks this year in which AGT aired the performance show one night, followed by a recap show and a results show (which I’m pretty sure were the same show with a different name) the following evening.

While I’m on a roll with NBC, American Ninja Warrior has long been one of my favorite summer treats. I marvel at these niche-celebrities and cheer on my heroes from year to year. But, yet again, NBC seems to have run out of footage, requiring each round of competition to be stretched uncomfortably long, week after week, such that  the home viewer would lose track of which round was taking place, who had been eliminated, and so on. And once social media discovered Kacy Catanzaro, the first woman to finish various phases of the jungle gym (let’s call a spade a spade), every episode became a love-fest, dedicated to teasing her story until her run five minutes from the end of the episode. That being said, I continued to cheer her on, as I’d done in previous years, and the series as a whole was one of my most-anticipated shows each week.

So You Think You Can Dance has been one of our favorite annual traditions for as long as it’s been on. We find it to be unique and with a fun host and judges. Like all competition-based reality shows, it comes down to personality of the contestants, and some years’ are more engaging than others. I never quite got into this batch of dancers for some reason, but it was no fault of the show’s. A fun diversion each week, but it never kept me on the edge of my seat this time around.

Jumping over to CBS and Under the Dome. Wow, the first season was okay, but this second season hasn’t kept my attention for one episode. My wife enjoys it, but even still, we rarely keep current with it, I think she hasn’t felt as happy with this season as the first. “Off the rails” is a phrase that comes to mind. Hang that up, CBS.

But, this summer’s winner for both of us has been Big Brother. We have watched all but the first season of this show, and it continues to be my favorite sequester-and-eliminate game show. Most years my wife hates watching it, but puts up with it for my sake, since there aren’t many shows that I clearly say I’m excited for. But this year, this hasn’t been the case, she’s enjoyed it more for the same reason that I think it’s one of their better seasons: not a lot of drama. People are playing to win, and trying the usual alliances to get people eliminated, but it’s not been for the usual catty, personal reasons. It seems like the players legitimately like each other, as evidenced by their concern when an unusual amount of personal issues have happened during the game (two family deaths, a few illnesses in the house). There’s still a couple episodes of this show, as I write this post, and yes, I’m sick of it, but only because I have a short attention span. It’s been a good season.

It’ll be nice to roll these shows out and bring on new episodes of the traditional fall season shows. We actually watch fewer shows during the regular season, which means that we will soon have more time to catch up on movies, and Netflix series. Over all, the content of the summer has been fun for me, I only wish the networks would be more honest and would keep their seasons only as long as they need to be.