Endless

Okay, so I’m going to out myself as a freak here; I don’t have any streaming services. Even more weird; I watch free to air TV. Now those admissions are out of the way, I can share that I binged a TV show last night. Difficult to do with the restrictions I admitted to before, but while I may watch free to air TV, I don’t watch it in real time. I record everything on a PVR (like a VCR but digital, why it’s not called a DVR I don’t know) so I can skip past the ads.

Anyway, I binged this show last night, staying up until 12:30am to see the end… Only there was no end. They left the main protagonist (who I was starting not to like anyway) with everything they had built across the series in tatters: their relationships, their business, their finances. And that was the end of the first series. Truly, WTF?

It seems to be a theme with both TV shows and movies these days to not resolve the issues by the end. I guess it must be so hard to secure funding for production that everyone needs to prove their future market before they get it, and they figure the best way to do that is to leave everyone hanging.

I find it incredibly irritating. First of all, I have the memory of a goldfish, by the time season two comes out I won’t remember what’s going on. Secondly, why would I invest my time (and PVR recording space) on a show that probably won’t end at the close of the next season either? Worse, what if they don’t secure funding and no next season follows? It surprises me that anyone can emotionally overcome these issues to risk watching any series anymore.

I wonder if the act of ‘binging’ can be blamed, at least in part, for this phenomenon? In the late ‘90s I had to wait until 9pm Tuesday night to see the next episode of Buffy. I really looked forward to it. I felt invested in the characters and I thought about them between Tuesdays. Being the perfect format of issue-resolution per show as well as overarching season issue-resolution, my love of the show and characters guaranteed I would watch next season.

When you binge a show you don’t get much away-from-the-screen time to think about them. The investment is not there because you just consume everything that happens in one big hit over a few nights (or one). Do you think about a binged show for long after you have finished watching it? Maybe only if you are wondering what happens next season?

I’m probably showing my age here, or my commitment-phobic tendencies, but at the end of a movie, TV show, or book, I want to walk away feeling satisfied. I want to be able to think about all the clever foreshadowing the writer(s) put into the story to bring it to an end that could have been no other way. I want closure. Don’t’ get me wrong, I’m all for re-using characters and building on the previous world, but please give them a new challenge. Most importantly, give me some kind of resolution at the end. It doesn’t have to be happy, but it really should be an end.