Since I started keeping track of how many movies and TV shows I've watched in 2023, I've fallen into the same trap as I have with books, namely that of chasing numbers rather than enjoying what I'm watching. In the context of books, it manifests in trying to read a certain number of books per year, per quarter, per month, etc, and trying to read a certain number of pages per day to hit those goals.
I haven't reached that level of obsessiveness with movies or TV shows, but it manifests in other ways. For example, earlier in the year, I was assigning certain TV shows to certain days of the week, which was useful for managing the concurrent seasons of Ted Lasso, Succession, the Mandalorian and Picard, among others. The adverse result, however, is that I become less willing to add a new TV show to my rotation, because I'll have a limited number of days to watch it.
Part of the problem there is that everything is serialized now. If you skip an episode of a show, you'll have missed developments that inform subsequent episodes, so you need to obsessively watch everything in order. It also means you can't just enjoy a few episodes or a single season in isolation, because you're missing the developments that came before, and not seeing the resolution of what comes after.
Serialization has been good for TV overall, at least to some degree. Star Trek is (as always, around here) a good case in point. The original series is criticized now for essentially resetting the characters between episodes - any character growth or lessons learned don't appear the following week. This makes sense in the context of TV at the time (and for a few decades after), where the real money was made in syndication, where episodes were broadcast out of order. The expectation was that an episode would run, say, at 6pm in syndication, and if someone wanted to watch some Star Trek, they watched that episode or nothing. Subsequent shows have been more serialized, though TNG was still easy to run out of order in syndication, while DS9 and most of the New Trek shows are harder to appreciate out of sequence.
The trouble is that sometimes you don't want to get sucked into a whole multi-season story arc, or even remember what happened prior to the episode you're about to watch. This is particularly true when a show falls out of your rotation for whatever reason, and revisiting it therefore feels like a chore.
Enter Blackadder, one of my favorite shows growing up and still one of the absolute classic British sitcoms. When I got on Hulu, I discovered that it was available there, which made me happy because it's been a long time since I watched it. I've started watching episodes here and there, when I don't have time or inclination for a one-hour drama, and I've been doing it out of order, which has been particularly refreshing.
Like all British sitcoms of the era, there's no overarching plotline or character arc to contend with. Each series has its own premise (Medieval England, the Elizabethan Age, the Regency, WWI), and most episodes make just as much sense in any order other than strict broadcast order. The only exceptions are the very first episode, which introduces the main characters and how Edmund becomes the Black Adder, as well as the final episode of each series, where the whole cast usually dies horribly.
So far I've just gone through and identified a few key episodes in each series, and watched one or two of those. For example, in the first series, my favorite episode is The Archbishop, so I watched that in isolation from the others around it, especially Born to Rule and The Queen of Spain's Beard, which are the other episodes from that series that stand with the best of the show overall.
Incidentally, the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, Goodbyeeee, ends on a poignant note that critics still talk about more than 30 years later as a moment that transcended its usual silly comedy. And the best part is, you don't have to watch a minute of anything that came before it, neither in its own series or the three preceding ones, for it to land.
As I say, serialization has led to more sophisticated and enjoyable TV overall, like my absolute favorite, the Wire. But sometimes it's nice when you can just watch a show, kind of mindlessly, without worrying about how it fits into the overall story. Blackadder's a good example, as is Law and Order, Star Trek TOS and TNG, and the Simpsons. The point, after all, is entertainment, rather than some obsessive chronicling of internal continuity.
That said, I'm looking forward, at some point, to starting another British show, Line of Duty, which I believe is completely serialized and has to be watched in order. Luckily, that's on Hulu as well.
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