How to watch TV

Have you watched it yet? You know, that show everyone’s been trying to get you to watch.

Part of the problem is that TV shows, especially older ones, are inconsistent from episode to episode. Another issue is the traditional need for broadcasters to fill 30-minute and hour-long blocks of time.

One episode of Star Trek expands the universe, develops characters, and tells a great story. The next meanders and feels like nothing is at stake. When this signal-to-noise ratio is low, watching otherwise good TV becomes a slog. So how to make things better?

Ideally, old shows would get the Dragonball Kai treatment. It’s a remastered, re-edited version that, so far, has retold the first 194 episodes of Dragonball Z in 98 episodes! It’s harder to do with live-action and the trend is toward completeness, so don’t hold your breadth.

Here’s some help so you can relieve that social/cultural guilt you’re carrying around.

Episode reviews

trakt.tv let’s people rate episodes of shows. AV Club gives out letter grades. There are a other sources, as well. Whether you put your faith in the widsom of the crowd or a few individuals, it’s a great way to weed out the cruft. Put it together and you have a comprehensive viewing guide.

VLC

Older shows move slowly and include filler to hit their alotted time block. If you’re a completionist and refuse to skip anything, do yourself a favor and get through the weaker episodes more quickly. VLC offers variable speed playback, which looks and sounds great well past 1.0x. Try one of the presets:

Or check off the Status Bar option under the View menu for fine-grained control:

Take an “hour-long” network show, where you get 42 minutes of actual TV. At 1.13x, you’ll barely notice a difference, but you’ll shave off almost 5 minutes per episode.

Bonus 1: Online guides

This past summer, Wired did a series of binge-watching guides for more than a dozen shows. They give you a quick rundown of the show and go over what not to miss, as well as the skippable dregs.

Bonus 2: YouTube

Enable the HTML5 player and you can start watching that backlog of TED talks at 1.25x speed.