Comments on: When Is It Too Late To Start Watching a Serialized Show?

By: George Thomas

George Thomas — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 08:47:12 +0000

Well, Rich you could always put the Battlestar Galactica 4.0 in my mailbox.

By: Rich Heldenfels

Rich Heldenfels — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:49:52 +0000

You reminded me of another issue in all this. How much refreshing should we do with serialized shows before they start a new season? For instance, I'm probably going to have to go back to a couple of episodes of "Lost" from last season before I dive into the new one…

By: Gus

Gus — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 03:27:52 +0000

My wife picked up BSG in 2006, and I'm STILL lost on who many of the characters are when we watch, despite my having now watched most of the first season on Netflix. As for HIMYM, I only really started watching that this season, but I got the joke since I'd seen some reruns from last season, and the full video on YouTube and elsewhere. And I started watching Homicide about midway through the third season, and always felt that I was fairly well-versed in the show (except for Crosetti's death, though I guess everyone was confused over that with NBC airing it out of sequence).

I think it would be very difficult/impossible for me to start watching Lost or Heroes right now, though thanks to Wikipedia and such, anyone can catch up with virtually anything before diving in. My wife caught up on 40+ years of Doctor Who history this way before the new show made its way across to the US.

By: Rich Heldenfels

Rich Heldenfels — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:41:33 +0000

The "Shield" premiere was one of the great kick-offs to a show for exactly the reason you discovered — not only in what happened but in what it said about the Strike Team's ruthlessness.

By: Annie

Annie — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:06:10 +0000

It depends on the show. It's WAY too late to start Battlestar Galactica without having seen the previous seasons. Nothing that happened would have any meaning for you. However, I started watching Homicide: LOTS in its sixth season, got hooked, and searched out the older episodes that were being rerun on Lifetime. And the 6th season isn't exactly H:LOTS' best! We started watching How I Met Your Mother at the beginning of last season and loved it, so we Netflixed (then bought) the DVDs for the first two seasons to catch up.

Both H:LOTS and HIMYM were episodic enough that most of the show could be deciphered by a new viewer. BSG is great, and might be intriguing to a new viewer, but they would miss a lot and the show would lose a lot of its impact.

On the other hand, we started watching The Shield at the start of its third season without knowing much about what had happened earlier on the show. It was easy enough to follow and we liked the show, so we borrowed the DVDs of the earlier seasons to catch up on what we had missed. BOY HOWDY, were we surprised by what happens at the end of the pilot! We knew the Strike Team did some questionable things, but we didn't realize just how much important information we were missing!