Late To The Game

I’m sometimes purposely late to the game.

No, not to a sporting event, but the game that everyone else is playing.

I hate watching the same thing everyone else is watching. I hate being “that guy” fawning over last night’s episode of (fill in the blank).

I watched Breaking Bad in its entirety after it was off the air.

I watched The West Wing 12 years after the show went off the air.

An ex got me to start Game of Thrones right before Season 7 and we binged the entire series in 6 weeks.

I’ve never watched Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead, True Blood, The Sopranos, and the list goes on and on.

Sometimes I’ll wait until a television series to have had 2-3 seasons under its belt before I get started. By that time, a series usually has a good following and the writing hasn’t gone bad yet. It happened with Two and a Half Men, Grey’s Anatomy, The Big Bang Theory, and now the Chicago series.

If I start a series from its pilot, the series usually gets cancelled within the first two seasons and I view it as wasted hours. Smash, Chicago Justice, Designated Survivor, Rise, and Manifest are just some of the shows that come to mind. I had high hopes for those shows and had hoped they weren’t cancelled. According to TVLine, Manifest is still on the Hollywood bubble and I believe that Designated Survivor was dropped and then went to Hulu or Netflix. The only show that I watched from its inception to series finale was Glee.

Well I never watched Dexter… until last week. The show didn’t entice me when it was on but on my commute home last week, I decided to see what the hubbub was about.

Oh.

My.

Splatter.

The show is great. Just over a week of starting the series, I ended up binge-watching Seasons 3 and 4 in the last 48 hours. The show is addicting. Now, I have heard that the writing goes down hill over the last few seasons, but I still need to finish it. I want to talk to people about it, but I’m still trying to avoid any spoiler alerts (you have no idea how hard it is to avoid).

I have played my own version of the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game for many years. But since IMDB came into play, it’s been my go-to for confirming roles. I get sucked into the wormhole of that website and if I see a guest-star, I wonder how long they’re in the series. Well, for a series that’s already completed, I don’t want to see if one of the main characters dies too soon because then I’ll be expecting it (i.e. Hodor in Game of Thrones). It’s been a fascinating series so far and I know turnover in series’ happens – it’s Hollywood. I just need to avoid IMDB.

Coming late to the game has its advantages, especially when seating isn’t reserved, but there’s always those risks.

Same when it comes to binge-watching a show after it’s off the air. I’ve devoted most of the last week to watching this show. With eight seasons, I can watch the entire series in under a month, but at what cost?

Watching a series is an investment. You want a return on your investment and don’t want to feel like you wasted time and money. I mean, thank goodness for DVR, but even trying to catch up on an episode or two while it’s still on air, is an investment.

But I’ll ask all of you.

What show should I watch next after I finish Dexter?