Underrated Tivo Advantage: Old Promos Can Be Hilarious

Tivo lets you skip the commercials. You never have to watch them ever again!

That's the well-known advantage of Tivo and other DVRs. Unheralded is the fact that you can go back and watch an episode of The Office from last year and see an ad proclaiming My Own Worst Enemy to be a "hit show." In case you need final, definitive proof that those promos for new shows are bullshit let me repeat that again: they said My Own Worst Enemy was a hit show.

I still had the last season of The Office saved until I delete on Tivo and I've been clearing it off to make space for new s.u.I.d. season passes for Community and Parks & Rec. Here are some of the shows I've seen promos for:

• Superstars of Dance
• Momma's Boys
• Kath & Kim
• Crusoe
• I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!
• The Philanthropist
• The Listener
• Rosie Live

I will admit, I love NBC. A majority of the shows I watch are on there, and maybe that's why I had forced these shows out of my memory. Still, almost every commercial break I kept my finger of the skip button because I was sure to hear the gravelly voice of the drama voiceover guy talking about how epic The Listener was going to be. The Listener?!

I actually went back and checked, and out of the 16 shows NBC debuted or promoted during The Office's '08-'09 run, one remains. Parks & Rec is the only one that survived. I know people rag on NBC all the time, but it didn't really hit me how bad things were until I saw all those promos for legendarily embarrassing failures. And I'm not even mentioning the promos counting down Jay Leno's final Tonight Show episodes!

Pretty incredible...so thank you Tivo for also being a time machine. An perfect record of the past as it was, not as we remember it. Also, I'm not mentioning Kings because I really liked Kings. Don't talk to me about Kings!