Saturday, November 6, 2010

It's Elementary, Right? Right?

They are showing a new series on PBS called "Sherlock".  It's a re-imagining of the Sherlock Holmes stories that takes place in modern day London.  Sherlock is a self-admitted high-functioning sociopath and Dr. Watson is a veteran of Afghanistan with a psychosomatic limp.

Based on hearing good things about the show, I set up a series recording on the DVR.  The HD channel, of course.  When we started to watch the first episode, we noticed that the show had a weird feature in the form of a narrator.  Narration is not itself strange but this woman was thorough.  She told us everything that was going on to an exhaustive level of detail.  I thought it was a little annoying but, hey, I figured it was their schtick.  Huppy, on the other hand, couldn't stand it and stopped watching.  I started looking on message boards to see if anyone else found the narration to be a little overwhelming.  Apparently not because there was no mention of it anywhere.  I found this to be puzzling since anyone who has spent any time on the interwebs knows that everything is mentioned at least once.  Everything.  Since we definitely weren't hallucinating her, I realized that she must be a service provided for the visually impaired.  OK, cool.  I'm sure it was just a mixup but I recorded the next episode on both channels (HD and SD) just in case.  The narrator was present again when we started the show but when we switched to the SD version she was gone.  The episode was much easier to watch without all the extra nattering.

Now, I'm glad they have these services for the visually impaired, I really am.  But am I a total jerk to think maybe it's not necessary to for them to do so on the high definition version?

2 comments:

  1. Isn't there some button on your remote (SAP, etc) that can select different audio feeds?

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  2. Not on the remote. There is a setting in the cable box menu where you can turn that stuff on but it's not set to on. My eyes _have_ been kind of tired lately...maybe the cable box knows something that I don't.

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