I just watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and it made me want to say things on the internet.
For some reason I decided to do that here rather than Twitter and/or Facebook (I don’t use G+ much any more BTW).
First observation – disturbing – is that even though I was watching a later episode (S7, E01, Lessons) I worked out than I am older now than Giles (OK Tony Head the actor) was then. When do I get to be all wise and stuff?
The second, and longer, thing was about why I watched it (and whether I’ll continue).
I watched it because last night I watched one of the Youtube listicle videos – “Ten times a character ruined a TV show” or something – and it brought up a few old series I’d watched but never finished and Buffy. And even though I watched all of Buffy it feels like it belongs in this category as well because, well I read a tweet today where someone talked about having watched every episode so many times.
Well, I feel like I somehow let myself down as a fan because I haven’t re-watched the later seasons as much as the earlier ones. To be fair even though I watched the earlier ones a lot, I haven’t re-watched them in a long time. (Used to be I’d get drunk and end up watching favourite episodes, but that tends not to happen these days)
There are for example, large numbers of season 7 episodes I’ve only watched once. I know! The shame.
But then I began thinking.
Suppose you didn’t have much of a life, never really went out. You go to work, eat, sleep and do the minimum chores necessary to staying alive and you spend the rest of your time watching TV and movies, maybe read the occasional book*. Suppose you are happy with this state of affairs and not railing against the dying of the light to make a change before it’s too late. Even then you find you only have so much time. And we live in a golden age of TV so we’re told. And whether that’s really true, it’s certainly true that I have heard of many ‘good’ series I’d like to check out, and more are on the horizon (just watched a trailer for HBO’s West World show).
So even in this restricted, shut-in existence, there’s so much to spend my eyeball leisure time on. Do I really want to go back and watch Lost to the end? Am I up for spending the next few weeks re-watching Buffy from the beginning because my OCD-ish tendencies tell me I can’t just break in later?
Maybe. Maybe not. OK, almost certainly not in the case of Lost. I think/hope I’ve let that one go.
My current mode of TV watching is to binge watch. Usually on Netflix or other streaming service. So it sort of fits this pattern, and yet…
It is about letting go. Realising there’s more to life, heck more to TV, than being a completist.
But maybe I will “binge” on S7 Buffy so I can say I’ve watched all those eps at least twice. Or maybe I’ll skip the boring ones in the middle.
It’s funny, before I wrote this I looked back at the last few entries. Because it’s my blog and I haven’t written in it in a while. And one of the things that came out was the way I felt my love of reading rejuvenated by letting go of some of my obsessive tendencies re: reading.
I guess this is the same.
*if this sounds familiar it basically was my life until recently, and it has only got slightly more interesting since.