my TV wasteland

My flat (apartment) has a TV, but no cable or satellite - we're restricted to the over-the-air channels. There are five of them we should be able to get, but in reality we only pick up two.
One thing this means is I haven't seen a single college or NFL football game this year. This is quite a difference, considering the past four years I've made a living watching college football, and long before I was paid for it I watched as much as possible. I have to say I don't miss it, but that's mostly because I'm not reminded that it even exists - there is no coverage of any American sports here, although there were about 20 pages of rugby coverage in the paper this weekend. I am on a quest over the next few weeks to find a bar to watch the baseball playoffs - I know they're carried here, I just don't know which establishments will feel a need to switch it on.

The other consequence of only having broadcast TV is that my roommates watch some horrible TV. Every night there's a local show called Shortland Street, which is a prime-time soap opera. The only thing I've ever seen to compare it too was a short-lived show on MTV (I don't remember the name, and I'm only hoping it was short-lived. For all I know it's still going on, but I only saw it a few times late at night when I was in college).
Every time I accidentally came across the MTV show I was convinced it was a sketch parodying a soap opera, because the plot and production were that bad. I kept watching, waiting for the joke, until I gradually realized there wasn't a joke - MTV actually expected people to watch this, and I'm sure some people did.
Shortland Street gives me that feeling every night.