Contemplating the new year, I was just thinking that it was about time I pruned the list of streaming media services I'm subscribed to.1 I hadn't watched a show on NowTV regularly since I drifted away from Lovecraft Country halfway through the season, I thought. I meant to quit NowTV once Game of Thrones finished, I thought to myself, but I didn't. Then I got sucked into the Nolan/Joy reboot of Westworld so I let the NowTV subscription live. More recently, NowTV brought me both Succession and an opportunity to see a show I couldn't see when it was originally broadcast, The Newsroom2, so again that kept me paying them that monthly fee for a while.
Let me just take a quick look in case there's anything popped up recently that I've missed, I thought. And then I found that since last I looked they're now showing Fringe, a show that I couldn't watch at the time but which I've always wanted to catch up on, what with it having an excellent reputation as an X Files substitute.
DAMN YOU, EVIL GENIUSES BEHIND NOWTV! YOU KNOW ME TOO WELL…
So, NowTV is safe for however long it takes me to work my way through Fringe, and I have further evidence that I am a weak-willed puppet of a massive media giant.
One day HBO are going to take the UK market seriously instead of letting NowTV have first refusal on UK streaming rights to most of their dramatic content, and I suspect I'll be adding another media streaming service to my subscription list.3
- I'm not kidding myself that this was a New Year Resolution, because I know from long experience that, for me, those don't stick. I was just sitting here contemplating a day off work and how best I could use it. ↩
- I know Aaron Sorkin's show got a terrible reception and it probably deserved much of it, but it also had enough of the good stuff that it was worth a look, IMHO. Looked back on towards the end of the Trump era, we should all be a bit less certain that a bunch of well-meaning white liberal men can be counted on to fix the world's problems (indeed, we can be pretty certain that they can't) but that's a topic for a different post. This post is about how NowTV keep pulling me back in every time I'm tempted to drop my subscription, so let's stay on-topic. ↩
- Of course, I recognise that another way of looking at it, one that NowTV's current owners might endorse, is that NowTV have built a business over the years based on their knowing what UK customers of a certain age and type want and giving it to them. Yeah, I could believe that. Not sure I do. ↩