Keep Track Of Your Weekly Television In A Beautiful Way With Televised 2

Televised 2 ~ TV Shows Weekly (Free) by Robocat is the revised version of the original Televised app that came out last year. It’s important to note that the app has gone from a paid app to free, but with the option to upgrade to “Televised Unlimited” to remove restrictions. However, if you’ve previously purchased Televised, you automatically get Unlimited for free.

There are a lot of shows that I watch, and with my busy schedule, it is often difficult to remember what day my favorite series air. That’s why I love my iPhone, because it has helped me remember when to tune in on my TV for my weekly dose of laughs, drama, horror, sci-fi, fine animation, and whatever else. Televised 2 makes it easy to see my weekly television at-a-glance.

With Televised 2, you will have a revamped interface, although to me it seems like minor, subtle differences from the original. The bars have been flattened, and there are no more bezeled buttons, but rather just icons that serve as buttons. Everything remains as easy as ever to navigate, and the app is still intuitive with an emphasis on visuals.

The first thing you’ll want to do when you launch the app is, of course, to add your favorite shows. Televised 2 will have a show directory that is split up into three sections: Featured, My Shows, and Search. All data is pulled from TVDB.com. Featured is basically what is hot and popular right now — you know, all those shows that everyone seems to be talking about nowadays. Chances are that you will find most of the shows you’re looking for from this screen. When you see a title you follow, just tap on it to check it off and add it to Your Shows. If you change your mind, you can simply tap it again to deselect it, or go to My Shows and tap on them to remove them.

Search gives you the chance to search through the entire directory of over 30,000 shows to find what you’re looking for. Results are delivered in real-time as you type, though it does seem to have a slight delay. So far, I haven’t had any issue finding the shows I want in the database, so it is pretty comprehensive, and you shouldn’t come across any issues either, unless you watch something really obscure.

Once you’ve added all of your shows, the main screen of Televised 2 will break everything down week-by-week. By default, you are going to see “This Week” first, but you can swipe horizontally or use the arrow buttons in the corner to navigate between previous weeks or upcoming weeks. You will see the shows that will be airing new episodes each week through their series posters, so it’s definitely gorgeous to look at. Televised 2 is also informative, in that it will show when a show has already aired, or when it will be airing, as well as the time and episode number. If things are airing today, the poster will have a label in the top left corner, so you can quickly differentiate it.

Tapping on a show poster will “flip” it to reveal the episode name, summary, and options to view it on IMDB, mark as watched, and share with others. I do enjoy the fact that if the episode did not air already, Televised 2 will hide the summary, so no spoilers are revealed (if you are one of those types of people who don’t even watch the “Next week on…” segments). Instead, there will be a “Show summary” button in case you do want to see the episode synopsis.

A quick way to mark an episode as seen is to also tap-and-hold on the poster from the main view. It will become dimmed out with a checkmark, so you can keep track of what you’ve seen on a weekly basis. I do wish that there was an episode list view or something, so that I can quickly mark up what I have seen at once, but there are other apps that can do this, such as iTV Shows 2, so I will stick with apps like that for full episode guides.

If you went too far back or ahead in time, you can quickly jump back to This Week by tapping on the header bar. Televised 2 also features background updating, notifications, and better settings for being alerted. You can access the settings tab and add more shows by tapping on the “hamburger” button in the top left corner.

The Settings has toggles for enabling notifications, notification time, sounds, spoilers, and week numbers. Tapping on the + button in the top contextual tray menu brings up the show directory once again, so you can add and edit your shows.

I’ve enjoyed using Televised in the past, and the 2.0 update makes it even more worthwhile to have thanks to background updating, better notification settings, and the ability to toggle notifications on a per-show basis. I just wish that there was a way to adjust the time shown for episodes, because it seems to be three hours before my show known show time (e.g., How I Met Your Mother is showing 5 p.m. airtime, when it should be 8 p.m. for me). It seems to be a time zone issue, but I can’t find a way to change it.

If you’re looking for an app to keep track of full seasons and episodes, then something like iTV Shows 2 is better. But if you are looking for a simple app to help you keep track of what you need to watch every week, then Televised 2 is a great app for the job. You can try it out for free (with a limit of three shows) in the App Store for your iPhone, with a $1.99 in-app purchase to upgrade to Televised Unlimited with no restrictions.