It’s getting to be a big gamble to get all invested in a new show based on the hype and promotional excesses networks cram down our throats pre-season. Because of that we have been progressively more reluctant to get into new shows for fear they’re just going to be jerked away right as things start getting good.
After the bastards killed Terriers this past year, I fear I will be waiting until the cream has risen to the top and do the way we have on:
Dexter
Grey’s Anatomy
Weeds
Breaking Bad
Mad Men
The Wire
… and probably several others that I have forgotten we were late arrivals for.
How many shows did you give at least a season’s (or more) headstart on?
Are you more or less willing to give a new show a shot than in years past?
Is there a network you trust more than the others not to kill off good shows?
Quite a few HBO shows, including The Wire, Deadwood and Big Love. I don’t get HBO so I’m only able to watch their programming once it hits DVD.
Also Veronica Mars. My wife had been a fan of the show, but stopped watching it when she moved in with me as we didn’t have UPN where I lived at the time. So we just ended up getting the shows from Netflix after the seasons ended.
As kind of a sidenote, I remember getting to the final episode on the second-to-last disc of the third season, the show’s last. It ended on a cliffhanger, and I couldn’t wait to see how all the threads were wrapped up, so I popped in the last disc, thinking it was going to have the last three or four episodes of the series, only to discover it was just bonus features, and the cliffhanger episode was the last.
The Shield – I was lucky enough to trust some recommendations early on and I think I have yet to see the first few episodes of Season 1 even yet. But it is the choice show for that sort of catchup, I believe. One of the best shows of the past 20 years.
Almost all shows are DVD (or Hulu) series for me. I will sometimes watch the animation line-up on Sunday. I watched House, Chicago Code, and Castle on Mondays. And I watch Mythbusters and Archer.
We’re watching Chuck this way. I’d catch up and watch them as they come out, but by the time one season’s DVDs are out, the next season has already started. It’s irritating.
Dexter. Just as I started this one, I find out that Netflix’s license is about to expire so I’ll never get to see it all (I don’t have the DVD service).
Eureka
Thinking of watching Sanctuary or Warehouse 13 next.
Mad Men & Archer are two that were hitting their second season before they hit my radar and caught up on DVD.
My wife watched something like five or six seasons of How I Met Your Mother within a week’s time using the cable “on demand” service. Whatever season this last one was, it’s the first she saw “live”.
