Televizzle.org

So I'm trying to watch Joey, one of my guilty pleasures, and the tornado watch stuff starts scrolling. No big deal. It's annoying, but at least it's relatively minor. Then they switch the whole thing off and show me the meteorologist drawing with his graphics pad. So far it's been on for 15 minutes.

Now if the event was a warning, and it was closer than 50 miles away, I might say that you could argue that it's worth the pre-emption. But it's not. Chances are that it won't. So why do I have to put up with this sort of thing?

The same thing happened a couple weeks ago, when I was trying to watch The Amazing Race. This one wasn't weather, though, it was pre-season/very early season college basketball. What is the deal?

Why can't I just watch the shows I want to watch? Haven't we progressed to the point where I ought to be able to choose whether I am pre-empted or not? Flash something on the screen, give me the option to pop over to another channel and watch more detail.

Tivo isn't even an option here, because all Tivo would do is catch the pre-emption. Sure, Tivo could catch it a few hours later, as is the case with basketball, but when it's covered with a weather emergency, it doesn't help at all. Tivo is useless.

Surely there ought to be a way that I can get the full network feed instead. I know there really isn't a practical way to do it. I could download the episode, and because I wasn't able to view it locally, perhaps I'd have a defense. But that's just a pain. Why has no one thought of this and devised a solution?