Confusion and Delay: Did You Finish That Series? All the Seasons?

Are you sure? Did you check? You might be surprised. I was. Looking back in wonder...

Before things hit Peak Crazy in the times of Peak TV, just before most critics finally admitted that they not only couldn’t watch everything, they couldn’t watch everything even in a winnowed down, edited environment — “only cable and streaming dramas,” “no reality, but network and cable and streaming comedy and short form drama that isn’t a returning hit,” etc.

In those days, there were a number of times when I actually couldn’t remember if I finished watching a show.

More often, there were tons of shows where I’d watched between 3-8 episodes to write a review, moved on to another show with 3-8 episodes for a review, added a movie, circled back for a miniseries, then spent whatever waking hours there were trying to keep up with countless current episodes of existing shows.

It was exhausting and unsustainable.

And even if I went back to finish off shows I really loved, to see if they held up for any best-of-the-year lists or not, there were always ones that slipped through the cracks. I had unknowingly just stopped watching them.

Sometimes the revelation of this was funny, as when a friend would say, “Man, I can’t believe they killed X on Y!”

And I would think, “Oh, shit, I stopped watching that.” Or, “Wait, they did?” And I would go back to discover that I had watched six or eight episodes but over time thought I finished them all. I hadn’t.

Even though it was bound to happen given the circumstances, it was disconcerting.

Some shows that I liked but didn’t love, well, I just gave up after a couple of seasons and never regretted it. I was in survival mode, being au courant.

I have sat down while people are watching something I finished long ago, only to realize the episode playing seems unfamiliar, unseen. That is, to add another “un” word — unsettling.

It’s one thing to know (and probably not care) that you stopped watching something and thus didn’t finish it. It’s entirely another thing to believe you watched to the end….but didn’t.

Semi-recent examples:

I knew that I hadn’t watched the final season of “Mr. Robot” — that I could remember. I told myself I would get to it eventually. Yet, when that time came, I had to rewatch almost every episode of the penultimate season to remember where I stopped.

And that’s a show I really love. I watched the final season a while ago and it was glorious to have it all wrapped up.

But it was part of an obvious pattern — shows I quite liked on some level but had stopped reviewing because they were more well known and review time was being spent on newer series. As critics on a hamster wheel of reviews, we started more than we finished.

The same thing happened, in a more troubling form, with “Humans,” the sci-fi series I loved and would watch for pleasure after writing about it a lot in the previous two seasons. I was excited for that third season, just to watch it for me — no review obligations, etc.

Yeah, I think I missed that by more than a year, which seemed pretty shocking to me at the time but less so as Peak TV piled up.

When I finally pressed play, the first episode seems…vaguely familiar? Let me keep going to remember and be sure. (Credits roll. Me: Hmmm. Seems new?) A few episodes later: “I really haven’t seen this, have I?”

At some point, all of this took on a hallucinatory feeling. Peak Insanity.

And then when I quit being a TV critic and spent a couple of years not really watching TV but writing it, you can imagine the disconnect that occurred when I came out of the cave and tapped on the remote. Oh, I was lost. I was very lost. I had missed things. I had forgotten things. I needed to rewatch things to catch up. It was my dissociative television disorder.

I can hear Sir Topham Hatt saying, “You’ve caused confusion and delay!” like some horrible nightmare.

It continues to happen. Here’s a little story about “Killing Eve” and “Mr Inbetween.”

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