Don't Worry, Entertainment Weekly Will Program Your TiVo For You
As if your life were not already dictated my media outlets and tastemakers, sorta popular DVR recording device company TiVo—overshadowed of late by cable providers' record-two-things-at-once! DVR systems—has signed a deal with Entertainment Weekly magazine that will enable users to have EW editors pick what shows their TiVo should record. Yes, that's right! Tim Stack and Gillian Flynn and Annie Barrett and all your other magazine friends will finally force you to watch Friday Night Lights! It's an interesting development for the networks, who continue to cede control of our eyeballs. Imagine if you weren't a loyal NBC viewer, but a Gawker TV viewer instead. You'd just have to fire up the TiVo box and there waiting for you would be all of the shows we are relentlessly obsessed with (so, like, 146 episodes of Gossip Girl and then a Frontline about sad people.) If a show starts to suck, like this season of Project Runway, we remove it for you. You don't have to press any buttons or anything! (What was that point Wall-E was trying to make again?) All the networks will be able to do is desperately act as publicists for their shows, hoping the astute editors at Ranger Rick TV or whatever will decide to pick up their new Tim Daly series and feed it right into our brains. A new middleman emerges? [WSJ]