He leaves CEOs and PR flunkies looking for the exits, but don’t ask Michael Moore to set your DVR.
The Oscar-winning director, whose most recent movie is 2009’s “Capitalism: A Love Story,” has spent some of the last five years getting way into “The Good Wife,” though apparently not so far that he’s noticed it’s perennially pushed past its scheduled Sunday start time by sporting events. And so he took to Facebook to complain that, like national health care and efficient public transportation, one more thing the U.S. lacks is smart DVRs that automatically adjust when a show is delayed.
Last night, The Good Wife on the East Coast started 40 minutes late due to the overrun of the NCAA basketball game. If you had your DVR set for the show, you ended up having only the first 20 minutes of it recorded on your DVR. And that means you missed one of the most important episodes ever of this engaging drama. In a public note on his Facebook page, he wrote.
In more advanced countries, like Ireland, the UK, Australia, those Scandinavian ones, etc., they have DVRs that record the show whenever it comes ON and it doesn’t shut off til it’s over, no matter what time it is. So if the guide says The Good Wife is on from 9pm to 10pm, but it actually doesn’t start til 9:40pm, that’s when the DVR starts recording. If a football game goes long — past the scheduled time you’ve allotted for on the DVR — no problem. The DVR never shuts off until the final whistle is blown. Sounds easy enough, huh? So why don’t we have these machines? Because we are no longer #!! Hard for most Americans to swallow that. We are way behind so many other countries on so many fronts – and we have no clue just how bad it is. Placing 30th in the world for our ability to do simple math should have been one of many warning signs.
All day today fans of the show have been lamenting that they didn’t get to see the shocking climax near the end — and that, thanks-but-no-thanks to social media, the ending of the show was ruined for them. Emotional moments like the one last night are rare on the free broadcast networks. Good TV was better, I guess, when we all watched it together.
(For those of you who are going to comment that the easy solution to this DVR problem is just to make sure you set record for the shows after The Good Wife and that way you’ll make sure you have all of it, I have this to say: a) you may not be aware but there are other great shows on Sunday night and many DVRs are set to record two other shows, like “Girls” and “The Walking Dead.” And the DVR won’t let you record more than two shows at a time; and b) that solution reminds me of my great-grandfather, circa 1915, who decided to keep his horse in case he needed it to pull the car if the car didn’t work.)
P.S. The Chinese already have 9 bullet trains merrily criss-crossing their country. Of course, we have none.
Does this mean we can expect Moore standing outside Les Moonves’ house with a bullhorn demanding to know what happened in last night’s game-changing episode? Stay tuned.
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