Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Tuesday, November 15th, 2022

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Tuesday, November 15th, 2022.

THE BATTLE FOR YOUR DVR
Tonight is the season ten premiere of History's The Curse Of Oak Island and as much as I am looking to watching the episode, I'm not looking forward to what it will do to my DVR. Because I know it means that over the next few weeks my DVR will be recording scores of other episodes that are nothing but clip shows with little or no new content that the network has labeled as "new." Why? So that they'll be recorded on the DVR of every person who is recording The Curse Of Oak Island.

Welcome to "DVR creep," cable television's answer to auto-playing video on your favorite web site. Some networks - primarily those who air a lot of reality programming - are aggressively pushing additional programming onto your DVR when you decide to regularly record one of their hit shows.

NatGeo does it most notably with Wicked Tuna, and History is especially aggressive with long-running shows such as American Pickers or The Curse Of Oak Island. You decide you want to record only the new episodes of your favorite program, only to find your DVR clogged up with "Best of" episodes with two minutes of "unseen" footage, clip shows that center around one of the show's characters or a myriad of other tricks designed to make the episode appear to have enough new elements to it that fans will tune in.

This trend has accelerated now that many reality shows are doing episodes in which cast members "watch" reruns and provide commentary. For instance, if you were unlucky enough to subscribe to the latest season of the Food Network's Restaurant Impossible on your DVR, you would have recorded that week's new episode, as well as one in which Robert Irvine and his wife watch an older episode. Along with the random clip show. Everything is labeled as new and there is no way to record just the original show episodes.

In fact, the Warner Bros Discovery group of networks have turned this DVR creep into a near work of art. Their various networks have began bundling shows together in two-hour blocks, making it impossible to record just the episode you care about. You'll record what appears to be a two-hour episode of Worst Cooks In America, only to find the episode is in reality 90-minutes long. The episode is followed by some thirty-minute special with a name like "The Ten Most Memorable Contestants," with footage drawn from previous seasons of the show. Those extra specials aren't listed in the programming guide and you won't even realize they are there until they've been recorded.

It was the same approach with the Discovery spin-off series Deadliest Catch: Bloodlines. Despite having heavily promoted the series (which stars a couple of fishermen from the parent series), you wouldn't find it broken out separately in programming guides. Instead, it was bundled into a two-hour block, following an hour-long episode of Deadliest Catch. The Travel Channel does the same thing with many of their most popular shows, creating a "new" two-hour block on your DVR that may or may not contain a new episode. And it's the same with Lifetime's Married At First Sight and the various incarnations of TLC's 90 Day franchise.

I haven't had any luck convincing one of the networks to discuss this issue with me. I'm assuming that they have discovered a certain percentage of people will just watch the entire block, whether they had planned to record it or not. Aside from the annoyance factor, this DVR bloat is a challenge to the people who subscribe to virtual cable systems have a limited DVR function. The basic DVR package on a lot of those services is fairly small-often limiting subscribers to 25 for 50 hours of storage. So filling up those hours with trickery and programming customers don't care about seems like a pretty bad business move in the long-term.

THE FUTURE OF WARNER BROS. DISCOVERY IS SO CLOUDY, I HAVE TO WEAR A RAINCOAT
In a wide-ranging conversation hosted by RBC Tuesday morning, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav painted a pessimistic picture of the near-term finances of the debt-laden Warner Bros. Discovery. He continues to make the argument that Warner Brothers was a lot "worse off" then he realized before the merger. And the ad market is weaker than he expected. But don't worry, everything will be fine. And you especially shouldn't worry about more cutbacks or content being removed if you work at HBO or HBO Max:

Elsewhere, Zaslav disclosed that WarnerMedia’s HBO business lost $3 billion last year after spending almost $7 billion on content. So one of the things they are doing is taking a close look at what people are watching on HBO Max and deciding where to spend going forward.

“We are right-sizing HBO Max — more content that people love, more original content,” Zaslav said. In other words, removing content that people aren’t watching, and adding more shows and movies that they believe people will watch and enjoy: “Our whole library went on HBO Max, and we weren’t selling any of it, but it was all on there. Now, all that could have worked, but we looked at it and we said, ‘Most of this is not being watched,’ or, ‘We don’t think anybody is subscribing because of this. We can sell it non-exclusively to somebody else. Look at this huge library that we have.'”

I know that I am being hard on Zaslav, but honestly, the more he continues to recite his talking points, the less faith I have in his strategy. He (and Warner Bros. Discovery) would be better off if he gave some more wide-ranging interviews rather than only speaking in these carefully controlled industry events.

ODDS AND SODS
* Hulu Live TV has finally added the Hallmark Channel and its sister network Hallmark Movies & Mysteries to its basic package. It's also added the Byron Allen-owned Weather Channel and Comedy.TV

* Stormy Daniels is hosting For The Love of DILFs, a new dating show for the LGBTQ+ television network OUTtv.

WHAT'S NEW FOR TUESDAY:

Here's a quick rundown of all the new stuff premiering today on TV and streaming:

A Friend Of The Family: True Evil (Netflix)
Cheeky Business (MHz Choice)
Customer Wars Series Premiere (A&E)
Deon Cole: Charleen's Boy (Netflix)
Good Bones: Better Yard (HGTV)
Johanna Nordström: Call the Police (Netflix)
Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous: Hidden Adventure (Netflix)
Neighborhood Wars Season Premiere (A&E)
Once Upon A Time In Londongrad (Peacock)
R.I.P.D. 2: Rise Of The Damned (Netflix)
Run For The Money Series Premiere (Netflix)
The Curse Of Oak Island Season Premiere (History)

Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.

SEE YOU WEDNESDAY!

If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.