Excitement! Suspense! Cliffhangers! Or…not.

[mrissa]

Further in my watching of ten gajillion cop shows with my workouts, I have noticed an alarming tendency to try to add suspense in all the wrong places. Not every season has to end with a cliffhanger. If people like your show, they will keep watching your show.

I repeat: NOT EVER SEASON HAS TO END WITH A CLIFFHANGER.

But if you do choose to end

Comments

[laurel]

TV is weird about cliffhangers as they seem to come in and out of fashion and now they're back in again so people seem to expect them at the end of the season. I think previously when they were "in" they were special events, it wasn't every darn show doing them. And these days, it isn't even just season finale cliffhangers, but we have half-season cliffhangers and the like. If they give us cliffhangers at every major break in the season it's no longer exciting at all, especially when shows take a potentially dramatic event and then do everything they can to return the characters and show to the way it was pre-cliffhanger

[mrissa]

I have kept watching Criminal Minds at this point because it remains absolutely perfect pacing for my workouts. It's like the ur-show for that. But it's clearly not the show it was, and there are some things that are actively betrayals of the show it was.

There is a certain degree to which I snap-judge shows on how obvious they are in the pilot. If I can tell you what line of dialog comes next 50% of the time or more, I'm out. This is probably unfair and makes me miss out on blah blah I don't even. Because: 50% or more of the actual dialog, done.

I don't even mind so much when PT is on fast-forward. I figure the time frame of TV shows is all weird anyway. What I hate is when it's toxic and wrong no matter when it happens. Like S4 of Legend of Korra, which literally no one appears to have noticed: there is telling the disabled person that it's all in their head. There is telling them that they don't want to get well and are using their disability as an excuse. There is "relearning to walk" without gait correction (GAAAAAAH

[laurel]

That is painful, I haven't watched Korra so. Eep. And yeah, time-frames on TV shows are weird.

Unless a pilot is painfully awful in multiple ways, I usually watch at least one or two more episodes before giving up because shows may change showrunner, writers, or even cast members between the pilot and the next episode. Plus pilots have such heavy lifting to do, they're often clunky. And many more people are involved in tweaking pilots than in future episodes. It's rare I see a good pilot anymore, there are lots of shows I love dearly which I thought were gonna suck based on their pilots (Community is one).

Weirdly, Homicide didn't have a pilot as the show was ordered without one which may be why the first episode is as good as it is and non-pilot-like. Open-ended, even.

I realized that I inadvertently watched the extended version of the Person of Interest pilot rather than the one they aired and this led to some confusion later because things they had to cut from the long version wound up handled in future episodes in slightly

[mrissa]

The few shows timprov watches any more, he often started by wandering in while I was watching a non-pilot episode, getting hooked, and going back. Because yeah: pilots. Too many cooks etc. He has said he might not even have watched The Good Wife if he'd had to start with the pilot.

[vcmw]

I go as far sometimes as really not caring for a show until season 2 or later. There are several shows I like that I started at season 2 or after, and only eventually backfilled season 1 with much plodding.

[mrissa]

Netflix may allow me to do more of that. Since I don't watch anything but hockey and occasionally baseball on broadcast, even if a trusted friend says, "Just start with S3 and see if you like it," I'm less inclined to invest the money in that. But Netflix! So.

I really appreciated when I was reading a particular mystery series and dd_b said, "They don't get any better from here, so if you weren't thrilled with this last one, it's more of the same." There are lots of TV series for which I could do the same. (Bones. Rizzoli and Isles. Etc.)

[laurel]

Yup. It can be really fun to go back and fill things in (unless the show really struggled early). Sometimes if you jump in mid-series, the show can even seem more interesting if you have certain elements of mystery that regular viewers don't.

In a way, I think it was easier for me to find and like shows that way before shows were readily available in their entirety.

Way back when, before shows came out on DVD and we were lucky if they came out on VHS, I fell in love with both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files (after resisting each for years) and I honestly think they might not have worked for me if I'd seen every episode of each show in order from the beginning (especially as they aired

[mrissa]

I can think of several shows that I have actually watched that would have been better that way. DS9 and Bab-5, for example.

[akirlu]

Interesting because I've had exactly the opposite reaction with a couple of shows. For instance, I dropped into a random episode of Burn Notice and could not get past wondering why the central character puts up with his hectoring, obnoxious, interfering mother. I didn't pick up the show at all until I dropped back and saw the pilot and got the answer (because he really doesn't have any other realistic options).