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I just turned on my TV and flipped through the guide. Right now at this very moment, there is one channel playing six episodes of Scrubs back to back. Another has four episodes of Family Guy. You can't find an episode of How I Met Your Mother airing alone any more than you can buy one roll of toilet paper at Walmart. It's always two or four airing back-to-back.

Remember not too long ago when it was a special occasion when networks would run marathons of a particular show? In the 90s, my best friend and I would put on a pot of coffee at Thanksgiving and watch an entire 30 hours of Mystery Science Theater 3000. They called it "Turkey Day," and we looked forward to it all year.

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And you couldn't record it without a shitload of VHS tapes

But now, all of cable TV seems to operate in blocks and I have no freaking idea why. If you're giving me eight straight hours of King of the Hill, aren't you forcing every single non-King of the Hill fan to abandon your channel for the rest of the day to go watch something else? Most likely a show about cakes?

My best theory is that it has to do with the DVR's everyone has now. If I want to catch up on House, I set to record and 15 hours later, my DVR has captured a little over thirty-six hours of reruns for me (including the same episode recorded 13 times). See, I don't think they do this to help the Tivo crowd. TV execs hate Tivos because they know you're fast-forwarding through the commercials. No, I think the idea is to completely spam your hard drive. "Oh, you want to record this show? Well here's 20 goddamned episodes, fucking CHOKE ON 'EM."

Oh, you like peanuts? THEN HAVE SOME GODDAMNED PEANUTS ASSHOLE

It's actually great for somebody like me, I was gone most of a decade but in a month or so I will have seen every episode of every relevant series that aired during that time period. I should shut off my TV again and come back in 2017, to compare and contrast, but I have 23 episodes of Tabatha's Salon Takeover to plow through.