Streaming video, Hal Brown

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April 22, 2022

In the previous blog edition I posted about politics (here). 

I posted a version of this on Daily Kos here.

Some friends think that my life revolves around following the bad news (and often writing about it on Daily Kos, here) that seems to come fast and furious throughout the day. This blog (for those new to it check the archives on the sidebar) documents the ways I escape from being mired in depressing and anxiety provoking news. I take many trips into the countryside and eat at lots of different restaurants including old favorites and new places. Another way I spend my time is watching streaming video.

Currently I am watching two popular and long-running TV series which I viewed when the originally aired. I am watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer  (on Amazon Prime, Rotten Tomato reviews) and Nashville (read reviews) which unfortunately is on Hulu.

I say this is unfortunate because while I have had no problems at all with Amazon Prime or Netflix, Hulu goes offline every few days. It did this last night and even though I unplugged my devices and rebooted them several times a message kept appearing that the service was unavailable.

This morning I did a simple web search for "Hulu problems" and discovered that I was wasting my time trying to get the service to function. The graph below shows exactly when Hulu stopped working on my TV.  Here's DownDetector, the website that tracks in real time which services are having outages, and this shows the reason I couldn't continue to watch Nashville.

After repeatedly trying to get Hulu to function I gave up and watched a few episodes of Seinfeld on Netflix. This is my back-up escape into what I consider pure comedy genius and the best written and acted sitcom ever made. I remember very well the plots of many of them having watched when they aired, but it is a treat when I see one that I don't really recall all that well. I just watched Season Three, episode 15, The Fix-Up, and episode 16, The Suicide. Episode 17 which I am looking forward to seeing, is an hour long special, The Boyfriend which Jerry Seinfeld has said is his favorite. TV Guide ranked the episode fourth in their 1997 list of the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time. Fans will remember it as the one about former New York Mets baseball player Keith Hernandez who appeared as himself.

On a related subject, I watched or rather tried to watch Steven Spielberg's Westside Story. I managed to get through about 40 minutes before giving up. I found it uninspired and boring. Despite it getting 91% positive critics reviews and an audience score of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes I agree with the critics who didn't like it pretty much for the same reasons they gave, for example The new ‘West Side Story’ has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Here a critic asks whether Spielberg actually ruined Westside Story.

I also watched The Batman the other day and managed to get through the entire movie though I didn't think it was particularly good even though it got 86% and 87% positive Rotten Tomato ratings.

On another related matter, last week I didn't get my issue of Entertainment Weekly which I count on to alert me to shows I might want to watch. For example they publish articles about what is coming to Netflix in the coming months. Instead I received a copy of People with a card that said the printed edition of Entertainment Weekly had been suspended. The card said the rest of my subscription would shift to People. I looked it up here to find out why.

I find People to be a useless magazine usually printing frivolous and fawning articles often about celebrities I never heard of. Fortunately, Entertainment weekly is still publishing online here.