Flash Forward

As I somehow missed Glee's "Showmance" when it reran, a friend was kind enough to lend me her DVDs to catch up. Once I had, I was faced with a choice: watch the rest of the episodes all at once or patiently wait for FOX to rerun them week by week.

It got me thinking about how I have changed the way I watch TV. For one thing I am more likely to be watching old British sitcoms than the new stuff these days now that I have Netflix. But even before then, I was seeing a lot of things on TiVo in batches.

Farscape, for example, was one of the first things I TiVo'd when they did a marathon in the run up to The Peacekeeper Wars. I watched all four seasons in the course of about two weeks. It made some of the middle bits easier to get through since I knew no matter how boring that episode where Critchon and Aeryn live another life inside a plot device was, there was another one right behind it. (Episode. Not plot device.)

The cliffhangers were also different: I didn't have to wait months to find out what happened to John after Moya was swallowed by the wormhole. I found out that he had survived and grown a really fake beard in a matter of seconds.

I can sometimes burn out when watching show after show after show, particularly as I got it into my head that I ought to watch them all in order. I got four seasons into Hercules before I realized that the next episode was the one where Michael Hurst dressed up as a Scottish dance instructor named Widow Twanky and taught Hercules how to tango. It took so much mental energy to work myself up to facing that, I was exhausted with the series even though the episode itself wasn't really all that bad.

Then there's the amount of choice. My Netflix Instant Streaming que is so long, I am not sure where to start. Sometimes, I just skip the whole thing and watch random documentaries about odd Germans motorbiking across the deserts of the world. (That one was pretty good.  You should check it out.) I love the idea of Hulu and the ABC app on my iPad and watching Merlin on SyFy.com, but there is just too much to keep track of on one service.

I suppose it forces me to choose and not just channel surf - except when I scan down the list for the next Doctor Who and wind up watching The Life of Mammals.  Do you know how long a sperm whale penis is? I do. Thank you David Attenburgh.

And there is something to be said for watching the show when everyone else is. It is like a shared experience, even if no one is in the same room and doesn't even know each other. I can still go online and find people who are watching the same thing that I am. (Except Beastmaster. I don't seem to be able to find anyone who still watches this show.)

Watching a show week to week also gives me time to process and think about the episode, which can sometimes change how I feel about. Sometimes, I have time to run things over in my head and get more and more annoyed (Flash Forward). And sometimes, I sort of talk myself into being a peace with things as there's time and distance from that thing that bugged me.

So, for Glee, I think I will watch week to week. Even as I'm playing catch up on shows I missed and squeezing episodes into odd hours ("TV when I want to watch it!"), it's nice to have a show I'm watching in a more traditional way.

Although, now I do kind of wonder what it would be like to watch a series backwards... Do you think I could get through six seasons of Lost without my brain exploding?

Future Shock

Acceptable. If there hadn't been so many things that actively annoyed the hell out of me throughout the season, then I would have enjoyed it more.

Except for Bryce blowing off Nikki and her whole Flash Forward of drowning. That is always going to make me decide that both Keiko and Nikki are better off without him. I mean, I get that he lurves Keiko and all (even though he just spent the past month seemingly being honestly in love with Nikki) but he knows Nikki's got her Dead Soon Issues and he just wanders off in search of true love without even asking about it?

Ass.