With the demise of the Sopranos, West Wing, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and with the interminably long hiatus of Friday Night Lights, the best show on television right now is Rescue Me. It has been months since the last episode aired and I had been anxiously awaiting the season premiere last night. Black billboards featuring only a Pink-Floyd-esque, stretched-neck-and-screaming Denis Leary profile started appearing in LA a few weeks ago, captioned with a very simple “rescue me” and “06-13-07”. All day yesterday I was excited to see what was going to happen. (Last season, of course, ended with a dramatic cliff-hanger.)
Now understand this: I have three televisions, two TiVo boxes, and a DirecTV HD DVR. These three machines have yet to fail me in 3+ years. Any time a show was missed, it was always entirely my fault for not double-checking the priorities. I knew that “Rescue Me” was set to ultra-high priority on the two TiVos and I — incorrectly — thought that I had told the DirecTV DVR to record it as well. But it was not to be. I forgot that the (absolutely horrible) software on the DirecTV DVR wouldn’t let me schedule a season pass for the show when I tried a few weeks ago. There wasn’t a new episode set to air in the near future so I couldn’t program it. So that system recorded Mythbusters and Modern Marvels instead. The two TiVo boxes were set to record Rescue Me on the FXP (the Pacific feed of the FXNetwork) channel at 10pm Pacific time. Unfortunately DirecTV dropped FXP and replaced it with the regular, East-coast feed of FX, so not only was the show airing at 7pm Pacific instead of 10pm, but it was now on channel 248 instead of channel 78. So one TiVo recorded Girls Next Door and the other one recorded what was probably its 3000th episode of Law & Order.
So now I have to wait for FX to replay the premiere on Friday night. All three DVRs are set to record it. Damn.