I Can't Quit You, CBS All Access. Damnit

By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 13, 2018 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 13, 2018 |

The end of the year is approaching, and I found myself spending some time yesterday trying to cull a bunch of subscription services that I don’t need, as the streaming wall wars and paywall wars approach. You know, you sign up for a $10 subscription here, and a $7 subscription there, and before you know it, you’re spending a few hundred bucks a month on subscriptions. Do I really need the Post AND The Times (yeah, probably). What about Showtime? Well, Escape from Dannemora is good, and Shameless is about to return, so I guess so. HBO? What have you done for me lately? True Detectiveseason 3 in January? Damnit. Hulu? Ah, hell: Future Man is returning next month, plus it’s the best way to watch all those ABC family sitcoms commercial free. The New Yorker? I mean, Ronan Farrow! But, no: I can let that one go, but now I have to subscribe to New York Magazine because they have a paywall, and I gotta have Vulture! But what’s this poll maker I’ve been paying way too much for? Oh yeah! I got a trial period to run a poll on the site, and I forgot to cancel it. Well, there’s a few bucks I can kill. DAY WELL SPENT.

But what about CBS All Access? I haven’t watched anything on it in months, and the only thing I care about is The Good Fight, and I just subscribe during the months in which it is on, right? Let’s cancel tha … wait, what’s that? A reboot of The Twilight Zone? From Jordan Peele? Oooooh. That is tempting. Who is in it? Sanaa Lathan? Adam Scott? Uh huh, keep going. Kumail Nanjiani! OK, OK. Alison Tolman? John Cho! Holy shit. And Steven Yeun, oh hell!

SON OF A BITCH.

So, the long and short of it is: Instead of canceling CBS All Access yesterday, I paid for the full year, because it’s 20 percent cheaper and I’m a sucker for The Good Fight (one of the year’s five best shows), Jordan Peele and Steven Yeun, and watching Survivor with no commercials.

It’s still a damn rip-off. Two damn shows. Three, if you’re into Star Trek. And it’s not much less than what we pay for Netflix per month. That’s insane, but they’ve got me by my Yeuns and Baranskis.