Our favorite television shows can be hard to find

Faced with a monthly cable bill that had swollen to $382, New York Times columnist Ann Carrns took steps to reduce it and eventually got it down to $230. All it took was a time-consuming marathon of research, obstacles and options.

“Watching television shouldn’t be this hard,” she lamented.

The reality, of course, is that we’ll probably never return to a time when television appeared on our black-andwhite screens free of charge, the only viewing options were ABC, CBS and NBC, and the hardest decision was who should get off the couch and walk across the living room to change the channel.

Granted, programs may not have been all that great back then, but at least we knew how to find them.

Now I not only don’t know how much we’re paying, I don’t know what we’re paying for. Or where to find it if I did. Evenings we used to spend watching a favorite show now are spent trying to remember where it was the last time we saw it.

Was it on broadcast, cable or streaming? Channel 2 or Channel 1788? HBO or Showtime? Netflix or Amazon? Was “Ted Lasso” on Apple TV+ or Paramount+? Do we even get Paramount+?

All of this confusion is self-inflicted, of course, fueled by the fear of being out of the loop if we haven’t watched the latest hot new shows. So to watch “Only Murders in the Building” we subscribed to Hulu. Or was that Tubi? The reason we have Disney+ is because the only way we could view “Hamilton” when the movie became available was to sign up for a one-month subscription, which we could cancel at any time. If we remembered. We’ve tried to solve the show-finding problem by writing down the times and locations of the ones we like to watch, but we keep misplacing the list. My wife suggested taping it to the remote control, but we have a five of those in three different rooms. Somewhere.

The television in our front room has three separate remotes: one for cable, one for the streaming service and one to switch from cable to the streaming service. Sometimes I grab the wrong device. The other day, I spent 10 minutes pressing buttons to locate a basketball game I wanted to see. In my defense, I got distracted by the noise of the garage door going up and down.

So while I sympathize with Ms. Carrns’ lament, I have problems of my own. The latest hot new show is a series called “The Gilded Age” and I need to start looking for it now before it goes off the air.