Why Watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Is Not a Waste of Time

I've been recently spending a significant amount of my free time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" on DVD. I never watched them when they were on the air, but now I'm catching up.

This has earned me accusations of being hypocritical, since I apparently tend to be critical of people who spend (what I consider to be) too much time watching TV.

Well...yes and no. I don't think I'm critical of people who spend a lot of time watching TV. How could I be? I watch a lot of TV myself. I am, on the other hand, critical of people who spend a lot of time channel surfing.

I am not going to try and convince everyone that "Buffy" and "Angel" are worth watching - at least, not in this posting :) People obviously have different opinions on this, and suffice it to say that I find the episodes well-written and entertaining enough to keep me tuned in (so to speak - these are DVDs after all). For whatever reason, I have made a conscious, explicit decision to watch every episode.

Hence, it doesn't make a difference whether I watch all the episodes in one big lump or whether I ration them out over a period of several years. I'm not wasting my time because it is my intention to eventually plow through them all.

Contrast this with the practice of channel surfing, in which you randomly flip through a series of channels until you finally settle on the program that seems the least awful. You would never go out of your way to watch this program and the only reason you do is because its timeslot and your sofa-sitting time happen to coincide.

That counts as a waste of time. It's the practice of "watching TV" as opposed to specifically "watching X" (where X is whatever television program you please) that I object to.