It is a strange and perplexing conundrum. For the lady or gentleman with the most highly tuned taste in television, the height of viewing pleasure is late - very late.
Dismissing the tawdry glamour of the likes of Dancing with the Stars, such connoisseurs become increasingly bleary-eyed as they wait for quality programming, which is increasingly being pushed further and further towards midnight and beyond.
Sadly, 12.25am is just too late, and it is for that reason I can only tell you about the first 20 minutes of last week's episode of The Wire on Monday, TV2, and that the fifth series of the show is already a few episodes into its final season, a fact that slipped my notice as I tend to sleep at night.
Quite why it hits the screens at that time is anybody's guess. Probably because it is regularly described as the greatest show ever made.
The Wire delves into the action and politics of the United States city of Baltimore's institutions: its police department, politicians, print media, and its criminals. But unlike so many cop-based shows, everything about The Wire, from the acting, to the writing, to the plot, is superlative.
And as with all the best dramas, just a little bit like life, the morals of its characters are at best ambiguous.
The police force is badly underfunded, the newspaper cutting costs as its advertising tanks, and its politicians - in fact all its characters - scheme and spin to stay on top. And that all happened before I fell asleep.
Created by author and former police reporter David Simon, the series was broadcast in the US by HBO, with the final series completed last year.
I've never met such a person, but for anyone who knows how to set their video recorder, this show is so worth the trouble.
Sky TV, every now and then, cheers its viewers with a new channel. Weeks before, it pops up in the guide as you flick through the channels with the remote, and sits there with its pregnant promise of something new.
In the latest case, something better than new, something funny. The Comedy Channel is good. I like it. I can ignore that much of it is repeats, because I never really tire of Seinfeld, Frasier or South Park. But it also offers stuff I haven't seen.
Free Radio is endearingly weird, a show about a radio station with a nutty, rude and inappropriate host, and his often embarrased co-host, who interview a string of real, and generally bewildered, celebrities. I'm saying nothing about Good Morning.
The Best of Saturday Night Live is fun too. And here's a funny thing: At about 11pm there are two soft-porn shows The Wonderful World of Sex and Das Crazy Sex Show, a la the E channel, with its Naked and Funny and Naked Wild On.
I can only imagine programmers are unsure where to dump these shows, and decide they are humour or entertainment.
Perhaps they're both.
