It probably won’t come as a surprise that we spend most of our evenings doing one of two things:  playing geeky board games (or card games) and watching t.v.  And like most good (geeky) Americans, we like to watch British t.v.  Between Netflix and the (now defunct) PBS app, we were pretty much set.

This year, however, PBS has kind of let us down.  I guess we have to take some of the blame. We don’t actually have cable and our homemade antennae had to be propped at an extremely vicarious angle to even pick up Masterpiece or Masterpiece Mystery.  If we could get the signal to come in, we would have to keep our exact spots in the room, no moving around to get snacks or go to the bathroom, or the signal was lost.

But now PBS has decided not to support it’s app through the XBOX anymore.  Are we the only people still streaming through the 360?  Apparently so.

That being said, suffering through Play On’s ridiculous technological glitches would be worth it, if our favorite British soap operas didn’t all suck this year.  By midway through Downton Abbey’s final season, we had decided the season where they killed off not one but TWO main characters was definitely the best to date, and the only way to save the show would be for the Granthams’ to start dropping like flies.

We thought our saving grace would be the slightly less well known Grantchester.  It was good, mysterious fun in it’s first season last spring, and we were looking forward to it immensely after the boring disappointment that was the Downton finale.  Besides, who doesn’t enjoy a drunken, conflicted Vicar who smokes like a chimney and fornicates like a teenager?  No such luck this season, though.  Sidney,  the Vicar,  is all brooding and troubled this season, and if his cop friend, Geordie, doesn’t pop him in his ridiculously aquiline nose within the next two episodes, they will both be dead to me.  Here’s hoping Great British Baking Show can renew our faith in (British) public television.