TiVo Anxiety Syndrome
An article cited on Gizmodo talks about how some TiVo owners suffer from anxiety because their machines record so many shows that they experience a viewing backlog. The owners then feel a desperate need to watch everything to catch up before recordings get deleted.
Arguably, this is a problem that can be solved with much more disk space, so that shows can be watched during those dead zones in the broadcasting schedule where all there is are re-runs. That, and a more conservative selection for Season Passes. But even so, you still get that psychic tug as the episodes pile up.
I had that happen with Firefly before it got cancelled. I wound up just watching one episode and then ditching the rest. I also had a number of Angel episodes pile up last season, but I did eventually watch all of them, over a few weekends of full couch potato mode. Right now, what’s piling up is Carnivale. I’ve seen the first two episodes so far; I haven’t decided whether to ditch it or not. Fundamentally, it’s only TV, and having an existential crisis over TV isn’t productive. That, and TiVo is “technology” in the sense economists use the word: it expands the range of possible actions and choices available to a consumer. You can chose to watch Carnivale or ditch it, and it’s better to have this choice than not. In the cited article, no one suffering from TiVo Anxiety Syndrome was willing to ditch the TiVo itself.