Back in the saddle again

For years I really didn't watch very much TV at all. NBC's Tuesday and Thursday nights of Must-See TV were, in fact, weekly must-see viewing in my house from the early 90s until well into high school, but I never really got into the weekly dramas, and by the time I got to college even the few primetime shows I had kept up with were either off the air ("NewsRadio," "Seinfeld") or had been on so long that I was relatively apathetic towards them ("Friends," "Frasier") - in addition to which, it was simply much more difficult to watch that much TV in college and, because I had more friends and easier access to them, it became less important. (The TV could still be a communal thing at times, but much of what we watched was the same ten videos every hour on MTV2, largely because they could sit in the background while we talked back and forth in a way that episodic television could not.) I recall the occasional landmark episode that we actually bothered to watch - the season finale of "The West Wing" where the hurricane hits, about which I still remember Drew complaining that the use of Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms" had ruined the end's impact, for example.

However, having TiVo had been slowly changing this, and now it's changing it much more. Not only have I started watching "Lost" and "House," but I've already ordered the former's first season off Amazon so as to catch up, and the latter's will probably be added to the stack in short order.

In Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby writes the following about his obsession with attending every Arsenal home game, even at the expense of blowing off friends' birthdays and the like: "What do I imagine would happen to me if I didn't go to Highbury for just one evening, and missed a game that might have been crucial to the eventual outcome of the Championship race but hardly promised unmissable entertainment? The answer, I think, is this: I am frightened that in the next game, the one after the one I have missed, I won't understand something that's going on, a chant or the crowd's antipathy to one of the players; and so the place I know best in the world, the one spot outside my own home where I feel I belong absolutely and unquestionably, will have become alien to me."

That's how I feel about this sort of thing. I never felt the same compulsion with the sitcoms I watched when I was younger (I rarely even watched every second of any given episode, particularly with "Seinfeld," due to the various humiliations and awkwardness that drove me from the room), but they have few callbacks to earlier episodes and the few that exist are missable. Not so with most dramas. Even with the "previously on [x]" episode starters, one can feel lost. CSI, in particular, is fond of calling back episodes from multiple seasons in the past - last season's sixth episode was a follow-up to the sixth episode of the third season, and the Paul Millander case was stretched over several episodes from the show's pilot all the way to the middle of the second season. The apparent mystery in the show's recent premiere surrounding a second person's involvement in Nick's kidnapping in last season's finale is just another example of this. (Thus the accusation from some quarters that CSI is not as compulsively-watchable because the shows are, like Law and Order, pretty self-contained, is somewhat unfounded. It's still not as serial as a show like Lost, but neither is it one where you can watch any episode whenever and not be confused.)

So it goes with Lost - though I know most of what happened last year, I don't feel right watching it without having seen the first season. Ditto for House - though it's not as totally serial as Lost, there's still plenty of continuity from episode to episode, as Craig noted to me that last season's finale had parallels to the show's pilot. It's also why I'm aggravated at having missed House last week for My Name is Earl, which wouldn't have been so bad if that show had actually been funny or good or well-acted. The episode I missed was not actually the season premiere of House, which it turns out I had in the TiVo, but still. The parallels to Hornby's situation are pretty apt - if you miss an episode, the next time you watch there could be references you don't get, or you could be talking to someone about the show and realize that there's something you don't understand. Thanks to TiVo, I won't be missing another of any of them - what a relief.