Note: This is the sixth in a series of posts looking back at 2007, in some key areas of my life that were important to me.
I watched this year.
I've been an avid TV watcher for many years now, but we set aside the idea of watching movies for much of our marriage just for lack of time and money and my health. This year, we did all of those things.
The end of last TV season, I was enamored with Heroes and Lost and several other shows. This had me continuing to read TV news through the summer to decide what shows I was most interested in watching for the new fall TV season (2007-2008). Even though not every show I started with was fabulous, I found some new loves. Unfortunately, the writer's strike took a toll on my enjoyment, and some shows are being considered as cancelled by default because of that. My very favorite new show of the year was Journeyman. Heroes and Bones were probably my favorite returning ones, even though there were storylines on Heroes that just didn't thrill me.
We spent a lot of time watching Netflix movies in the evenings this year. We were just on the one at a time plan, but we tried to take as much advantage of it as we could by watching it the same day it came and stuff like that. This let us see a nice combo of movies and TV series.
We received 71 dvds from Netflix, an average of 6 per month. 27 of those were series disks, part of a TV series (like the 3 seasons of the 4400 and 2 1/2 seasons of Babylon 5 so far) or miniseries (in the case of Into the West). I put 52 movies into Vox, with the difference being just that some dvds were part of a series.
This year was also a big year for TV on DVD. In addition to the aforementioned Netflix series we got, we also purchased a nice pile. At the beginning of the year, we owned 3 seasons of TV on DVD. Now, we own 10 (talked about in September) + 12 more for a total of 22 seasons! We got the rest of Buffy and Angel on sale at various times and E just received the 4 seasons of Futurama. Obviously, we haven't watched all of those (so they aren't added to Vox), but it's a great thing to slowly rewatch and enjoy commentaries and other specials.
One thing that's been fun in the last year was finding the local Hollywood Video Outlet, where you can get a really good deal on previously viewed movies. I've been able to get some of my favorites to own, like Paycheck and Poseidon (big screen one with Josh Lucas AND the TV movie with Adam Baldwin) among others. This is a fun way to get to rewatch my favs, especially when there isn't great things to see on TV.
And then we saw movies in the theater - 4 in the summer and then the Golden Compass recently. It's fun to be able to sit through a movie without my body hurting so much, that's what slowed us down a lot before.
My favorite TV on DVD series that I watched this year was The 4400, season 3. The most surprising good movie I saw in the theater was Transformers. And my favorite out of the movies I rewatched on TV this year was A Knight's Tale.