Except for most local sports which is difficult to find (and that's why I got to sports bars with friends) you can find nearly everything you used to get with cable online. Sometimes even at the same time a program is airing. If you have google foo and patience, and no how to spot the scam pages from the legit bootleg feeds, you can find live streams of most everything.
I don't have cable, yet I've watched every episode of the Walking Dead and Son's of Anarchy on my computer at the same time as everyone else. Sites like Justintv and Ufreetv usually has streams to just about every cable channel or special program. Shows like Walking dead you may find 3-4 folks putting up the feed on Justin Tv.
The caveat to this is that sometimes the quality is low, or the feed is glitchy, OR bots/mods may try to quash the feeds, but if you follow certain stream broadcasters they will usually throw a backup feed right away and direct you to it as it is happening. And often these feeds have mangled names to throw off the bots, like "Shambling Unliving" for example.
And if you like cooking shows, or pawn shop shows, or whatever, a lot of folks on JTV, and some of the other sites do marathons of one particular show, putting up all episodes then swtiching after a few days. I've watched every No reservations episode that way, plus cooking shows you can't see here like Gordon's Ramsay's "The F Word" which is much better than the BS shows they have him host over here.
I also bought recently a ROKU set top box for my TV which allows me to watch all sort of programming from the web right on my tv, in HD if the streams are. I can even watch those channels from Justintv as well.
I haven't had cable for years, and haven't really missed it TOO much. I can't always watch Tiger's Baseball because there's noone usually streaming Fox Sports Detroit on a regular basis...but since there are ESPN feeds online, I can watch them when ESPN hosts the games, or when they appear on network tv.....Red Wing hockey can be difficult as well, but there's usually one stream available, either from Fox Detroit or the city where their opponent is from for every game.
There's sites like Crackle that have older episodes of most shows and even movies available.
There's also obviously Netflicks or Amazon or even the new one that Walmart is hosting VuDu I think it is called, that you can watch episodes of new shows for a small cost, usually only 24 hours after it aired on TV.....
Between online, netwrok tv with the over the air antenna, and my roku box, and all the channels on there, I've not missed much....In fact I've discovered even cooler programs from England that didn't air here in the states. I've been watching a bunch of BBC- Channel 4 history shows on Dailymotion where they take a historian, and two anthropolgist and live an entire year in a certain time period, living, working, raising food, cooking, etc. There's one series where the recreated a Victorian Pharamacy for a year in a historical village. One where the lived on a recreated Medieval farm. One where they did the same on a Victorian farm, and Edwardian era farm, and the current one about life on a Farm in England during WWII, where they've re-created everything including taking in refugees, food rationing, survivng bombing runs, and even setting up an underground resistance movement.
And I've even found some great cooking shows from Australia and England that are even better than ones of Food Network.