Sarah On SARA (And Vice Versa)

This would be funny if it weren't so absurd... OK, on second thought, I guess it's still pretty funny.

Vicki and I are quite enamored of the show, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which has had a very strong second season so far. Despite being big fans, we actually missed one episode in the first season, and the reason for that is the point of this blog post. No matter how many times I set my SARA box to record all episodes of this program at any time - and I've done it more than a dozen times by now - the moronic set top box will only record the next one. I just set a request of that sort a few minutes ago, and I'm 95% confident that it'll put tonight's episode onto the hard drive for us. However, regardless of whether or not we watch tonight's episode (and delete it) over the next 7 days, if I simply waited around until 8:00 p.m. next Monday, confident that I'd get next week's installment as well, I'd be sorely disappointed (as I've been in the past). Despite this process working fairly reliably for all of the other programs that we watch, SARA just will not record Sarah more than once per setting! SARA seems to have a 1-Sarah limit!

I have a theory on this, weak though it may be. My suspicion is that there's a key difference of some sort in the name of the program itself, and that's somehow screwing up the recurring nature of the recording-request. Specifically, the show has a very long full title: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and yet it almost always shows up in the SARA guide screens as simply Terminator. The one exception is the "Set Recording" screen, where the full title appears. I've seen this sort of thing before, with titles that one week will have "(HD)" at the end of them and other weeks don't, and that can cause recurring recording requests to be ignored. This particular scenario, though, has proven to be 100% reliably broken to date.

Has anyone else experienced this, or is it just a gremlin in our box?