Remember when, if you wanted to watch a TV show, you had to be right there in front of the TV at the time it aired? If you missed it, you might have to wait months to see it. You might never see it at all. That might've been your one chance.

I remind my kids of this all the time. They are gobsmacked. It is beyond their realm of comprehension.

When I was a teenager, a local station showed old serials like Flash Gordon... at 1 am. Never broadcast back then. I'd set my alarm, sneak downstairs and watch it, then go back to bed and get up for school! I did that my entire sophomore year.

And music on the radio! I waited with my finger on that cassette recorder for my favorite song…

We might get back to that, if the model of yanking everything off streaming continues... Ugh. Boy do I remember fastidiously programming our VCR to tape shows though, and hoping that the timing wouldn't screw up.

... entire genres of T.V shows had to adapt to this situation by ensuring that nothing ever actually changed for the characters! Because if someone missed an episode (which was guaranteed), they wouldn't know what was happening.

I turned on the TV once after school to see a weird puppet program about rats doing drugs in the sewers as either an anti drug psa or anti gang (or both) and never saw it again. No amount of googling has ever shed a light on what that was. TV was ephemeral

I never fully understood the weird way they resolved the Charmed season 3 cliffhanger so I always assumed I missed it. I sat through the reruns countless times on TNT, before the age of Wikipedia, before I eventually found out how Prue died.

There is a major reason I modified our ancient steel screen door into a TV Antenna in order to get Star Trek TNG with some spare speaker wire that was just laying about.

Missed an episode of "Firefly" ("Out of Gas"). Didn't see it until the DVDs came out.

I remember. Then came the VCR. And the struggle became wider.