Active Desktop
To make things easier to manage without using a keyboard I put shortcuts to Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube. As I sit here I am thinking about changing the desktop settings to add web objects. With that I can make a big ol web page that displays instead wallpaper. Perhaps that will make it seem more like a DVR. I'll mess around with that soon. Once in any of those sites I have accounts (free for Hulu and YouTube) set up. Each one has subscriptions to my shows and a queue that includes automatic and manual additions.
A quick word about Hulu Desktop. It is awesome, really great way to navigate through the Hulu videos as though it was a DVR, but it pegs out the processor on anything full screen no matter how low you make the video quality. The VLC fix doesn't work because Hulu Desktop is a stand alone application and not able to integrate plugins as Firefox does.
The last display adjustment I made was to set up the browser window so that it automatically opened in full screen. This removes the window borders and make the video look more like tv and less like a PC. To do this I chose a Firefox add on called Full Fullscreen. I didn't investigate many options but this did just what I wanted.