The Fair Weather Viewer

I watched the first season of Showtime's "Dexter" when an edited version aired on CBS one summer. I loved it, but there was no way I was paying for Showtime, so I left it at that. A couple of years later, I heard a lot of fuss about the fourth season, the one that featured John Lithgow's performance as the Trinity Killer. So I waited for the season to hit DVD, and I rented my way through that one. The reviews of the fifth and sixth seasons were not so glowing, but season seven has gotten a huge amount of buzz, and it looks like I'll be hunting down the DVDs next summer. Thus, "Dexter" has become my prime example of fair weather television viewing, the kind of show that I tune in for when it's good, but tune out when it's not.

In the past, this kind of viewing pattern would have been impossible to maintain. Television reviews on an episode-by-episode and season-by-season basis weren't nearly as accessible and prolific. You couldn't pick and choose between seasons before the advent of DVD box sets and on-demand streaming services. Heck, Amazon and iTunes let you purchase and rent specific episodes, if you really want to split hairs. I prefer watching shows I'm heavily invested in like "Mad Men" or "Breaking Bad" episode by episode, but when it comes to more casual viewing, sometimes I don't want to deal with the mediocre seasons or more often I just don't want to trudge through a sizable backlog of episodes for a show I've fallen behind on in order to get to the more exciting developments that have happened recently. This is what happened to me on "Merlin," which I stopped following at some point in the middle of the third series, because the storylines were moving at such a glacial pace. Now "Merlin" is in the middle of a much more promising fifth year, and I'm mulling over how much of the fourth I'd actually need to watch to catch up. From what I've read, probably just the first two episodes and the last two episodes. The DVDs should show up Stateside in January, and all the episodes are available for purchase already on iTunes.

The other big piece of this is that I no longer mind waiting for shows to become available. There's so much good television available on home media or streaming, that there's always something waiting in the wings for my attention. I can't watch the seventh season of "Dexter" or the fifth series of "Merlin" right now as they're currently airing, but I've got a growing list of other shows I'm supposed to be checking out or keeping up with to ensure I'm busy in the meantime. I've been letting myself fall behind on more and more shows this year, including "Grimm" and "Person of Interest." "Person of Interest" has been a particular hassle to watch because it's a rare network show where the current season is not available online in any form whatsoever. However, I know that the whole season will be on disc and streaming by next fall, and then I can watch it at my leisure, with the added bonus of skipping through the filler. There are several episode guides that have conveniently pointed out which are the more important mythology episodes that advance the larger plot and which are just standard cases-of-the-week. I like "Person of Interest" enough as a procedural that I would probably watch every episode like I did last year. But it's nice to know I don't have to.

I used to be a serious completist. I would expend considerable time and effort making sure to catch every single episode of the shows I liked. I could program a VCR in my sleep and hoarded empty VHS tapes. The uncertainty of possibly never being able to find a particular episode again after it had aired, and missing something vital, drove my obsessiveness. I can still be this way about the programs that I really care about following, but more and more television is no longer nearly as ephemeral or inaccessible. If I'm uncertain about whether a show is going to be worth my time or not, I can wait until the reviewers weigh in. I can drop a show midseason and come back to it a few years later without too much hassle. This is bad news for content producers because now there is a lot more riding on the quality of their product, and the need to hook viewers early and keep them involved is becoming more and more important.

I know that not everyone has the means or the temperament to watch television shows this way, but I think my mindset is becoming more common, especially as there are so many alternatives to traditional appointment viewing now. Out of all the pilots I watched this year, I'm only following one new show regularly, "The New Normal." The rest, if they develop into anything interesting, are just going to have get in line with everything else on my "to see" list.
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