Back when New Zealand television was three channels of hospital dramas and bad sitcoms along with one hard-to-find channel of misdirected youth programming and whatever Sky was showing, it was easy to plan your television viewing: If you had a bookcase in your living room, you went to The Listener; otherwise you went to TV Guide.
On Sunday nights, you carefully highlighted your selected programmes for the week ahead, hen you made sure you were at home to watch them. It was called "appointment viewing", although Ally McBeal aside, there were very few shows that justified the term.
Today, though, there are great programmes everywhere you look, although very few are on Three. There are four paid streaming services - Lightbox, Neon, Amazon Prime Video and Netflix - on which you can call up whatever they've got whenever you want it, and there's Sky On Demand, TVNZ on Demand, Three Now and Maori Television on Demand, on which you can do the same for free.
We live in a world in which we can use our phones to access basically all the world's collected information and music, whenever we want, for no pay, and basically all the world's movies and books for a small fee, but we cannot, in any legal way, no matter how much money we're prepared to spend, watch a surprisingly large proportion of the world's best television at a time of our own choosing, without sending an unusually large amount of money to Mighty Ape in exchange for a DVD, which is a technology that once existed.
What this boils down to is: Why, given all the streaming technology and vast, seemingly endless piles of content, can I not - for the love of God - find any legal way in which to watch The Leftovers, which industry benchmark Metacritic rates as the most critically acclaimed series of 2017?
