More thoughts on tv and its ephemeral nature.

My preferred mentality when watching television is to treat it as a weekly event. The network and parcels the whole series out to me at regular intervals. In conjunction with waiting for the conclusion of a cliffhanger, tv becomes a more compelling experience (if you think that's an artificial way of creating anticipation, oh well).

That's just another way to paraphrase my first post, but here's the new bit: the advent of on-demand television has complicated my junkie-ish attitude. DVDs and P2P programs (which I never use, nope, do you hear me??) collapse the idea of the serialized show. For one thing, I've noticed it's much easier to binge on a series just because of the accessibility of the subsequent episodes. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing. I might never have gotten through more than a handful of episodes of Sopranos if I'd seen them weekly, since I had a rather disinterested reaction to what I saw. But it was there, and combined with the critical buzz, I managed to watch 3 seasons worth.

On the flip side, Sports Night. I love and revere and own it (the box set, anyway). But when I watched it, I found it extremely difficult to limit myself to just one episode, which not only prevented me from savoring the individual and unique taste of each episode for a proper amount of time, but the sometimes disparate tones of consecutive episodes also brings my overall appreciation to a more tepid level.

TV forces us (me) to be patient.

DVDs = gluttony and instant gratification and hey back-to-back posts with related themes.