My Tivo needs an Ex-lax

Is too much access to TV just too much? I believe that's the real question at the heart of Mark Harris' Entertainment Weekly column on DVRs constipated with unwatched programming, which I can very much relate to. As I gear up for the fall TV season, I am feeling the itch to simply wipe the DVR slate clean. The ax already fell earlier this summer on "John Adams" and "In Treatment" and at the moment "Generation Kill", "Last Comic Standing" and "Reaper" seem to be next up on the chopping block. 

Just a few years ago I never would have had the daily conundrum of having too much tv to watch, sure there were a lot of great shows I wanted to check out, but if I wasn't at home for the original airing I simply didn't watch it. Sure I had a VCR, but the rare occasions that I got the recording timer to actually work were few and far between and so it went that I missed an entire season of Friends and Felicity my junior year  in college when I had class every Tuesday and Thursday night. These days with the latest and greatest addition of DVR to TV technology, there is almost nothing I can't watch and with two household DVRs that can each record two shows simultaneously  at my disposal I mean literally, nothing. As a self-described TV addict this should equate to something equivalent to TV ecstasy and for the most part it is, but I have to wonder if the fix is worth it when I inevitably find myself scrolling through the recorded shows list feeling guilt over the shows that remain unwatched and that are slowly filling up free hard drive space.