Every evening, basically without fail, I watch TV with Arthur for 2-3 hours.
We don’t get broadcast TV or cable here. And streaming is too unreliable given our copper wire DSL connected to the rest of the world via Satellite uplink.
But Arthur has an immense library of TV shows and movies ripped from DVD and stored in his iTunes application hooked up to his Apple TV.
Mostly what we watch are mysteries and crime dramas, police procedurals, and old action movies. These are what Arthur prefers. He doesn’t like slow-moving dramas or “art films,” and doesn’t think much of comedy, either. But within his preferred genres his tastes are broad and cosmopolitan.
I enjoy these shows well enough, for the most part. But they aren’t compelling entertainment, for me. When Arthur has been gone at various times, and I’ve been here alone, I feel no inclination to watch TV on my own. I don’t miss it. But I don’t mind it when we do it, either.
One series I enjoy is a police detective series from New Zealand, called Brokenwood. The mysteries in each episode are genuinely mysterious – the show doesn’t telegraph the solution like many shows do. And there is a lot of understated humor in the scripts. I also enjoy the NZ accent. We recently started season 5.
In recent months, however, we’ve also been experiencing a kind of “meta mystery” each evening. A series we have been watching is the infamous NCIS – a US crime procedural which was ubiquitous on Korean broadcast TV, when I was living there.
Arthur has been struggling with his computer, and his efforts to rip and organize his shows. With respect to NCIS, he has repeatedly managed to mix up the titles/episode numbers vis-a-vis their actual contents. So for example we will start watching an episode labelled season 3, episode 18 only to find it is in fact season 3, episode 8, or season 2, episode 18. There is no particular pattern to the mistakes, but they are abundant. And Arthur gets quite perturbed, yet he struggles to sort out what is going on.
Each night, we have to start and stop several episodes to find the “right one” with respect to where we are in the series – given we are trying to watch them in order. Some nights, we give up and just watch one we haven’t seen. It doesn’t help that most of the time Arthur has no memory of any of the previous episodes, so he has to rely on me to tell him whether we’ve seen a given episode or not. I suspect this lack of short-term memory is also why the labels on the episodes get mixed up in the first place – he has his routines, which he won’t consider changing, where he does various cut-and-paste actions in his applications on his computer, and he holds information about which files he’s working with in his working memory. But if the working memory is unreliable, that can lead to the mislabeling we’re seeing. He won’t consider changing his procedure – I’ve suggested he write things down, or start breaking the steps down in such a way that he’s not trying to process multiple files at once. But he would rather spend an entire day re-arranging his files on his computer, cussing the whole time, only to find a mystifyingly still incorrect labelling of a collection of episodes as we sit down to watch in the evening.
It’s hard. There’s not much I can do. So lately I’ve taken to thinking of it, in my mind, as a kind of “meta mystery of the day”: to puzzle out what happened this time to the labels on the NCIS episodes. This has been going on for several weeks. I don’t expect it to change anytime soon. And given NCIS has some 400 episodes, we’re in for a long ride.
