As with all things, my rainy day TV show list just keeps getting longer. At the top of it are Search Party, the last season and a half of Better Things, and the last two seasons of Catastrophe. The last one I knocked off it was Only Murders in the Building, which I burned through in a weekend a couple weeks ago. When I sit down ready to pick something off of the list, there are a couple factors:
1) Is another season coming soon, which would motivate me to catch up in time to join the conversation (hello, Better Things!). This is what got me to finally watch Succession last year.
2) Is it a show that has weirdly long legs, such that it's still getting discussed long after it aired (Only Murders).
3) For a show that I loved but fell off of, am I ready to finish it knowing there will never be more? This is where Catastrophe falls, made even more emotional by the Carrie Fisher element.
4) Vibes. Like, I know I will love Search Party. I like everyone involved in it, every critic I like speaks highly of it. But somehow the vibe is never right for me to watch that show. One of these years. There are a lot of shows that fall into this bucket; especially for ones which already ended and will never end up in category 1 again, there is just always going to be a high bar to finally get to it.
I have been spending less and less time engaging with TV on Twitter (where the urgency is real) and more time in Slack and Discord communities. What this means is that while, sure, there's some element of recentness (Yellowjackets, From, and Severance all benefit from the community buzz), there's actually a pretty big emphasis on going back to those rainy day shows for group watches. I'm currently running through Twin Peaks, Dark, and Justified for the first time thanks to those communities. So I feel a lot less of that pressure anymore! An older show will come around when these communities vote on a new weekly watch.
But there's still too much TV even for those spaces, so I'd say it usually comes down to two questions for me: 1) why am I watching; and 2) who am I watching with. For the why, I guess I think of it in terms of kind of turning off my thinking TV brain vs. starting something new and thinky. It might be like the vibe idea lol. But the inertia of falling into a fourth season of a comfort food sitcom or guilty pleasure drama is the real barrier to getting to those rainy day special gems. For the who, there's some negotiation with my partner, who tends more toward classic sitcom than dark comedy or serious drama. There's also a film studies digital watch group where it has to be something new and worth engaging with week-to-week. I did a LOST rewatch with colleagues that just ended last week. So, there isn't really much time left to make those decisions I suppose lol.
As with all things, my rainy day TV show list just keeps getting longer. At the top of it are Search Party, the last season and a half of Better Things, and the last two seasons of Catastrophe. The last one I knocked off it was Only Murders in the Building, which I burned through in a weekend a couple weeks ago. When I sit down ready to pick something off of the list, there are a couple factors:
1) Is another season coming soon, which would motivate me to catch up in time to join the conversation (hello, Better Things!). This is what got me to finally watch Succession last year.
2) Is it a show that has weirdly long legs, such that it's still getting discussed long after it aired (Only Murders).
3) For a show that I loved but fell off of, am I ready to finish it knowing there will never be more? This is where Catastrophe falls, made even more emotional by the Carrie Fisher element.
4) Vibes. Like, I know I will love Search Party. I like everyone involved in it, every critic I like speaks highly of it. But somehow the vibe is never right for me to watch that show. One of these years. There are a lot of shows that fall into this bucket; especially for ones which already ended and will never end up in category 1 again, there is just always going to be a high bar to finally get to it.
I have been spending less and less time engaging with TV on Twitter (where the urgency is real) and more time in Slack and Discord communities. What this means is that while, sure, there's some element of recentness (Yellowjackets, From, and Severance all benefit from the community buzz), there's actually a pretty big emphasis on going back to those rainy day shows for group watches. I'm currently running through Twin Peaks, Dark, and Justified for the first time thanks to those communities. So I feel a lot less of that pressure anymore! An older show will come around when these communities vote on a new weekly watch.
But there's still too much TV even for those spaces, so I'd say it usually comes down to two questions for me: 1) why am I watching; and 2) who am I watching with. For the why, I guess I think of it in terms of kind of turning off my thinking TV brain vs. starting something new and thinky. It might be like the vibe idea lol. But the inertia of falling into a fourth season of a comfort food sitcom or guilty pleasure drama is the real barrier to getting to those rainy day special gems. For the who, there's some negotiation with my partner, who tends more toward classic sitcom than dark comedy or serious drama. There's also a film studies digital watch group where it has to be something new and worth engaging with week-to-week. I did a LOST rewatch with colleagues that just ended last week. So, there isn't really much time left to make those decisions I suppose lol.