DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Suffering from a sort of existential torpidity, an emotional exhaustion brought on by a temporary failure to cope with modern society’s demands to do more, more, more, we broke down and sought refuge in common broadcast entertainment: we subscribed to cable television.

Comcast offered a special rate on the Starz! premium package, which if memory serves would eventually (after the special rate expired) cost about $90 per month. $90/month to watch a couple of movies?! Hello, NetFlix! We never planned to keep the service for very long, so we signed up and briefly looked forward to having dozens of movies per day to enjoy.

Starz! isn’t one channel, but 13, some of which have separate East and West Coast feeds. We ended up getting about 18 channels that showed something appealing at least once in a while. The Starz! website displays a grid of the day’s content; I checked it frequently in eager anticipation.

It didn’t last. I don’t know if the problem is Starz! or cable TV in general, but 98% of the content is crap. You’d think that with 18 channels of movies running 24 hours/day, there would nearly always be something good on. This is definitely not the case.

I admit that we taped a pile of movies. Some of them will even be worth watching. The rest were taped in desperation — “hey, here’s one we’ve actually heard of; better tape it!” $90/month?!

After a few weeks, we’d run out of tape, and Starz! had run out of content. Scanning the next week’s grid, I found literally nothing worth two hours of my time. I called Comcast to cancel the service.

The sales rep tried hard to retain my business. And she offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse — I could downgrade to basic cable and pay less per month than if I cancelled the TV feed entirely. The TV service includes a $14 discount against the Internet service, and the price tag for basic is $12, so in essence Comcast is paying me $24/year to receive a TV feed I don’t want. I guess they get some small value out of artificially inflating their subscriber counts. Or maybe they know that every American human will, if given the opportunity, watch television at least sometimes. They may even be right.

If I find myself actually watching, though, I’ll gladly pay $24/year to stop. I’d sooner babysit your kids than watch television. Or better yet, I’ll set your kids down in front of the TV and spend the evening doing something worthwhile, like, I don’t know, picking my ass. Seriously.

I guess the best thing about having Starz! for a month is that I saw the last 15 minutes of Ang Lee’s Hulk, thereby saving myself the 123 other minutes it would have someday taken me to watch the whole thing. That is just about the dumbest climax I have ever seen. Nick Nolte, what were you thinking?

What I now wish I’d done is fill a couple tapes of FoodTV shows. It didn’t occur to me until the day after I cancelled.