The PopCulteer
MAY 16, 2025

So…I’m not really in London.

Your humble blogger is still working from the teeming metropolis of Dunbar, but my computer thinks it’s in London. Allow me to explain (and fill up this short edition of The PopCulteer).

As part of my now two-month-long (and counting) effort to upgrade my computer and internet, this week I signed up for a popular VPN service (which I will endorse whole-heartedly once I have the chance to see how much I like it) and for a couple of reasons, one related to paying work, I have used it to set my virtual location to London, England, which is just one of the many cool things you can do with a VPN.

My main reason for this was a work-related issue where I needed to have access to a client’s servers in the UK. But the side benefit is that I now have access to Netflix in the UK.

Netflix is different in every country, and in the UK they have quite a few programs that they do not have in the US.

For instance, and this is the big one actually, in the UK, Netflix is home to ALL of WWE’s programming.  In the US they show RAW on Monday nights.  In most of the rest of the world they carry RAW, NXT, Smackdown and all the PLEs.

As a extra treat, they carry these shows commercial-free. There’s actually bonus programming to fill in most of the gaps caused by the US commercial breaks.

And this is desirable, not only for the bonus content, but because our local CW affiliate, WQCW, is run by WSAZ, who have always had utter contempt for their network programming and seem to enjoy pre-empting their most popular entertainment programs in order to show sports. They tend to do this with no warning.

It’s like their ad sales department can’t sell anything but ads on sporting programs, and their programming department doesn’t care to let the public know in advance that the show they’ve been looking forward to watching all day will be replaced by a Reds game, or hockey, or some other nonsense.

It is apparent that, for the remainder of the baseball season, WQCW (managed by WSAZ) will be pre-empting the highest-rated show on The CW every Tuesday night, NXT. They won’t admit to this, but it’s happened the last two weeks and at one point they shared a graphic on social media indicating that it was “Every Tuesday.”

So rather than put on my Don Quixote outfit to do battle with WSAZ once again, I just cut them out of the equation. Tuesday I watched NXT on Netflix, and it was delightful.  I didn’t have to watch the same four ads for WSAZ’s news team over and over, and I got the bonus content instead of any commercials. So basically, WSAZ/WQCW can take the Reds and stick them up their ass. I don’t need ’em anymore.

This is not the first example of better living through streaming that has caused me to circumvent WSAZ.  They are also the local affiliate for ME TV on one of their digital subchannels, and over the winter they had the audacity to pre-empt the highest-rated show on that network, Svengoolie, for a freaking Columbus hockey game.

I didn’t even know Columbus had a hockey team.

I mean, you don’t mess with a fella’s Svengoolie. Keep in mind that WSAZ has NEVER shown Toon In With ME, the daily classic cartoon show, because they’d rather run their 7 AM news in that timeslot…at the same time they also run it on The CW.  It has to run on two channels so they can be dicks to fans of cartoons.

Rather than get mad (not a good idea at my age) when I got wind of the hockey blasphemy, I signed up for a streaming service called FRNDLY TV.

For seven bucks a month I get a suite of channels, including ME TV, the new ME TV Toons, and several other ME TV related channels, along with four dozen other channels like A&E, The History Channel, Lifetime, The Weather Channel, Game Show Network, Reelz and more.

It even has a built-in virtual DVR so you can record the shows that are on at inconvenient times and watch them whenever you want. It’s like a cool mini-cable system for seven bucks a month. And it’s worth every penny just stick it to WSAZ.

Let me explain…I’ve been pissed off at WSAZ for probably fifty years. Back when Saturday Night Live was first announced, I was extremely excited. I was a huge comedy nerd. I knew most of the writing staff and some of the cast members from The National Lampoon and various projects, and I knew that it was going to be a ground-breaking show.  So I was ready to watch it the first night it debuted, back in 1975.

And WSAZ did not show it. Instead they showed a tape-delay of a University of Kentucky basketball game. When they weren’t pre-empting it with local tape-delayed sports, they’d find anything else to plug into that timeslot.

The Charleston/Huntington tri-state market did not get to see Saturday Night Live for THREE YEARS.

It was 1978 before WSAZ relented to popular demand and finally began showing one of the hottest programs in the country to its local viewers.

That did not stop them from occasionally pre-empting SNL with no warning for tape-delayed airings of UK basketball up into the mid-1980s, but much of the time they did carry it.

But that’s the kind of thing that can make you stay pissed off at a TV station for half a century (and counting).

Now, thanks to streaming, WSAZ and their associated stations, are dead to me. I can watch NBC programming on Peacock. I get my ME TV fix on FRNDLY, and now I can watch NXT on Netflix.

So…WSAZ, y’all can go straight to hell. I gots me a Roku.

There are other advantages to having my virtual location in England. I can finally use my free BBC account to watch stuff in their comedy library. Ads on YouTube are vastly different, with much better music and all sorts of food products we don’t get over here. The prices are in pounds. I get to turn down way more cookies with a single click at most websites, too.

There are disadvantages, too. When I went to Facebook to gather graphics for this week’s STUFF TO DO column, at first all the events listed were in London. Amazon and eBay tend to freak out a little bit when I log in. And some times the VPN does not play nice with the Roku, so I have to watch some stuff on the computer.

But all in all, it’s worth it, if only to deprive WSAZ of my viewership.

And that is this week’s PopCulteer. Check back for fresh content every day and all our regular features. Also, Keep Calm and Screw WSAZ.

Pip, pip, Tally Ho!