Viewing

I highly recommend Todd VanDerWerff’s latest TV think piece, “In Defense of Slow TV,” where he argues that sometimes it helps to take a show slowly, one episode a week or so, rather than in marathon or “binge” form. He notes that some shows, like later seasons of The Sopranos, benefit from the slower pace of one-episode-at-a-time viewing, and may not come off as well when the episodes are treated as one long movie (with the resulting emphasis on plot momentum). The piece isn’t an argument against the marathon/binge method. It’s just pointing out that that we see a show differently depending on how we choose to consume it, and it may come off differently – and sometimes better – when taken slowly. We’ve all heard about shows like The Wire that work better on DVD than one week at at time; this is just the flip side of that.

That’s an question that I’ve heard more often lately (though it’s been around for a while; I wrote another post addressing the issue a couple of years ago). Increasingly the answer is “yes.” The traditional way to encounter a TV show is just to drop in and start watching, and maybe catch up with the earlier episodes at a later date. But now that TV series are taken more seriously as complete and coherent works, to say nothing of the fact that we can watch from the beginning no matter how late we discover the show, there’s an increased preference for getting the full experience of the story from beginning to end. Even where the show deals mostly or partly in self-contained stories, like Justified or almost any half-hour comedy, many new viewers prefer to start from episode one.

While I have said elsewhere that my favourite stupid Superfriends moment is Green Lantern getting knocked out by a red bird, I’ve been informed that this might not actually be from the Hanna-Barbera Super Friends cartoon, though all incarnations of the format before Justice League are equally legendary for their terrible scripts and “everything happens offstage” rule. (If you made a drinking game out of taking a shot whenever the animators save money by keeping a major action offscreen, or have a character tell us what’s happening, you’d be drunk before the Wonder Twin Powers Activate.) So, forced to pick the stupidest H-B Super Friends scene, I unhesitatingly pick this scene, where Aquaman, the most useless superhero in the world, wipes out the Western Hemisphere while trying to put out a fire at sea. And yes, this is all part of the bad guys’ plan. In other words, they are counting on the fact that Aquaman will kill us all whenever he tries to “help” us.