In between homework, midterms and a social life, who has time to watch a television show regularly? With a different schedule every day of the week and not much reliability to be found in asking roommates to tape episodes of “ER” for you, it’s no surprise many students end up missing their favorite shows every week, only to catch them out of order in reruns over the summer.

That’s where the folks at Television Without Pity (www.televisionwithoutpity.com) come in. The site exists precisely for people with abnormal schedules. Featuring recaps of shows ranging from “The O.C.” to “Newlyweds” to “Six Feet Under,” TVWoP provides information, humor and interaction for those of us with hectic lifestyles.

This isn’t your average recap site, though. Rather than providing cut-and-dried versions of what happened on specific shows, the recappers at TVWoP interject a great deal of their own personalities into their writing, making the summaries both interesting and at times hilarious.

Take “Six Feet Under,” for example. Even if you missed an entire season of the show, you can check out the TVWoP site for an archive of recaps spanning the show’s whole history.

The writer for this particular show, Aaron, is unapologetically enamored with Lauren Ambrose, who plays Claire. He also invents imaginary dialogues between himself and the show’s producer, comes up with quirky acronyms (DGDJ means Dead Guy/Gal Du Jour, the person who dies at the beginning of each “Six Feet Under” show) and names characters’ houses after strange plot points (Brenda’s apartment is the “brotherf-cking boudoir, for example).

“Newlyweds” recaps are another highlight of the site. The recapper, Stee, manages to show exactly how dumb Jessica Simpson is without discounting the show entirely. And his jokes about how Nick’s career is completely over, while his spoiled wife’s is somehow still afloat, easily keep readers entertained (it’s called Television Without Pity, after all).

For those of us who don’t subscribe to pay channels like HBO, TVWoP is a godsend. Besides the aforementioned “Six Feet Under,” the site also recaps favorites like Showtime’s “Queer as Folk” and HBO’s “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos.”

Rather than waiting for the seasons to come out on DVD, web surfers can just check out the TVWoP site to catch up. This comes in especially handy when there’s a big event, like the last episode of “Sex and the City,” that you can’t watch but are dying to know the details about.

The second major feature of the TVWoP site is its message-board forums. There is a forum for every show recapped on the site, and users can log on and post their own opinions about plot points, characters and speculations, as well as rate specific episodes.

If there’s one downfall to the forums, it’s that users can’t post about a specific week’s episode until after the episode has aired. This may seem like a no-brainer, but judging from a quick look at the forums, many users are overanxious and want to post while they’re actually watching the show, which isn’t allowed for some reason (the forum for a specific week’s episode doesn’t open until the episode is done).

Full recaps take five to seven days to be published on the site, but if you’re really anxious you can read “recaplets,” really short versions of the recaps that are published almost immediately after a show ends. And if you don’t want to be bothered with checking back for the full recap, you can sign up for e-mail updates that notify you when your favorite show’s full recap is posted.

So, does writing television recaps for a popular website sound like the best job ever or what? Reviewers for TVWoP would probably agree, given the fact that they all seem to have TiVo, a tax-deductible expense given its use in their employment. Getting paid to watch TV and write about it sounds glamorous, but don’t get your hopes up — the FAQ page of the TVWoP site states very clearly that there is no chance of getting hired: “We are more than fully staffed at the moment and don’t anticipate hiring anyone new until one of our current writers quits or dies.”