Reid About It

Like many of you, I enjoy television. I spend a lot of my life camped out in front of the tube, enjoying what I consider to be the new Golden Age of TV.

By the way, I'm well aware there are no longer any "tubes" in a television. "Camped out in front of the plasma" doesn't have that same romantic tone.

Technically speaking, I have a metric crapload of channels to watch. For what I pay for television, I should be able to call up my provider and have them stage one-act plays for me.

However, as anyone with more than two channels knows, that's not the case. There are great stretches of time where there's nothing worth watching.

I've grown increasingly frustrated with the pay channels, especially. I have an HBO package, which I've had since the Sopranos was on the air. While HBO still does have good original programming, the other 23 hours a day appear to be programmed by a drunken monkey with darts.

Here's a random sampling of my eight HBO channels tonight at 7pm central time.

Real Time With Bill Maher - An original HBO series, if you discount the fact it's basically the same show Bill Maher has been doing since 1993.

Planet of the Apes - Nine years old. Here's my policy, any movie with Mark Wahlberg's name over the title, skip it. "Max Payne," "The Happening," "Rock Star," bleah. Any movie where's Marky Mark is part of an ensemble cast, like "The Departed," "The Lovely Bones," or "The Perfect Storm," watch it. It's probably pretty good.

Band of Brothers - Fantastic miniseries, which is what I said when it came out nine years ago.

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl - Two years old, and I doubt I'm the target audience for it anyway.

The Assignment - This movie is thirteen years old, yet I've never heard of it.

Suburban Commando - Okay, I know this must be their "family" channel, but it's nineteen years old, and it stars Hulk Hogan. That's two things right there that shouldn't be used to entertain kids.

Ghost Dad - Just when you thought HBO was slacking, along comes a movie that makes "Suburban Commando" look like "Schindler's List." This is a twenty year-old piece of dreck from Bill Cosby, which is widely thought of as one of the worst movies of all time. This movie, along with "Leonard Part 6," pretty much undid all the positive karma Cos had from "The Cosby Show."

Alice - Even better. I have no idea what this is, and the "Info" button doesn't even help me. Unless Linda Lavin is in this one, I'm clueless.

By my count, I pay forty-five thousand dollars a year for my HBO channels, although my math might be off a few decimals. You'd think I'd be treated to better programming than "American Kickboxer 9" and "Larry The Cable Guy Gets Worms."

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Reid Kerr does not have a favorite Hulk Hogan movie, only a list of the ones that aren't the worst.