Betrayed By My TIVO (also known as TIVO vs. TV Land)

Now when I purchased my TIVO unit two years ago, I hailed it (at least in our household) as revolutionizing the way we would watch TV. “Yeah, that’s the ticket.” With two little ones running around, we would no longer miss important moments in Lucy and Ethel’s lives because we didn’t want to miss the punch line in Laverne and Shirley’s. See, I thoroughly enjoy television and appreciate it as a true American art form and cultural component, especially classic TV.

Both of these things came together tonight. I was watching the last two installments of TV Land’s “100 Greatest Quotes and Catch Phrases” that I had TIVO’d a few weeks ago. My first thought was “Dyn-o-mite,” it’ll be so great to see how all of these sayings that permeate our culture came to be. “Would you believe” it was “marvelous,” simply marvelous to watch all of these classic television sayings? If you haven’t noticed, I love pop culture references, so watching the two one-hour shows received a big “two-thumbs up” from me.

Well, at least it did until the end of the first hour when I realized that the TIVO unit was running about six minutes behind and stopped at catch phrase #24 instead of #21 like it should have. “Bang, zoom, to the moon,” “what you talking about” TIVO? How could this be happening? We can go to “space, the final frontier” and put a man on the moon but can’t have our TIVOs synched correctly with TV Land to allow us to tape the whole 60 minutes of the same show? “Well isn’t that special?”

Actually, it isn’t. So, I began the second hour knowing that I would miss seeing what the number one catch phrase was. It’s a shame too, because it was such a ‘really big show.’ All was going ok until about phrase #11 (Fonzie’s “Aay,” if you are keeping score) when I clicked on the TIVO button to realize that I was already forty minutes into it. “Holy crap” Marie, I exclaimed, which made my wife really mad since her name isn’t Marie. “Good grief.” The show’s not even half way over and there’s only twenty minutes left! “Holy time bandits, Batman!” Now I’m getting agitated and keep clicking the TIVO button to reveal the precious minutes counting down. The show is going so well and all the guests commenting on each catch phrase are so spunky. “I hate spunk!”

Now the time is really going by. I mean it “kept going and going and going” and “yada, yada, yada,” the time runs out just after number four ("Baby, you're the greatest" from Ralph Kramden, if you’re playing at home). Great, the top three phrases aren’t recorded and now I’m left wondering, “where’s the beef?” As everyone knows, there’s only one thing you can say at a crushing time like this…"D’oh!"

As Mr. Cronkite himself would say, “that’s the way it is.”