Would you miss commercials?

Desperate Housewives. Six Feet Under. West Wing. All things I am addicted to and miss.

Hong Kong TV is strange. It’s not bad, but just really different. We subscribe to a cable TV service. Well, really, it is TV that comes in through our telephone line but does that really matter anymore?

It, like so many things here, is a completely random mix of things that are U.S., British, Asian, and who knows what.

We get four Discover channels, including Animal Planet and one channel that shows a hybrid of U.S. makeover and cooking shows. I watch that often. HBO, Cinemax, and STAR are all added expenses for us but only marginal added value. Programming differs greatly from their U.S. counterparts with the Asian versions being relegated to run mostly unpopular shows released in the 90’s. As I type this, the Wednesday night feature is The Net, starring Sandra Bullock. Not bad, but definitely not up to the expectations I had when I saw there names on the contract. Add to this list a couple of BBC channels and our subscription service is almost complete. Oh, of course, there are about a dozen channels in Chinese that I am skipping over here and CNBC, which offers two nights of Jay Leno per week.

The BBC has lots of techno-strange colors to remind you that you are leaving or entering a commercial break.

So what’s strange? Well, a couple of more things add to the twilight zone feeling I sometimes get when watching. First off, it seems there is some great crunch on expenses here as all the channels tend to have one block of 5 hour programming that they repeat three times in a twenty four hour period with a few other non-repeating shows thrown in. They start with prime time and then repeat that again overnight and during the following day. I am a bit slow, but even I realize I am watching the same episode that was on the previous night.

Perhaps even stranger…commercials. There are spaces for promotions in programming, just as you would see in the U.S. The difference? There are no paid advertisements on TV here. None. All the commercials are promotions for other programming on the TV networks. All of them.

What I would give for a good channel with some sitcoms. Ah. They have them in Asia. We’ve had them in a hotel in Singapore. Even in Portugal, our hotel in Sintra had a great selection. But then the randomness continued, even in Portugal, with the Lisbon Marriott having almost no TV options – CNN and BBC – no sitcoms, movies, or other.

It’s amazing to me the sporadic options that are available. I hope I am not too overwhelmed on returning to the U.S.