The Apathy Of Television

ap·a·thet·ic - showing or feeling no interest, enthusiasm, or concern.

Apathy or feeling apathetic is something that plagues me far more often than I'd care to admit both personally and professionally. But this is not about that. This is about me experiencing this feeling regarding shows that I once cared about but no longer do. There are certain shows where I get straight up upset about and ones where it gets to a certain point and I just stop caring. I'll miss episodes for weeks or months telling myself that I'll binge watch eventually but never do.

Over the last four or five years I've watched more TV shows than movies when it used to be the other way around. I'm one of those people that when I like something I fucking love it. Allow me to use the Netflix series Luke Cage as an example. The first season had a good story, great characters, and cool music. The second season arrived last week and a few episodes in I could already feel my interest slipping. The story was sloppy. The directing was inconsistent. The music was overdone. By the time it was finished I hoped that they were not planning on doing a third season and wished that the one I'd just watched did not exist.

Part of this is the length of episodes. I can watch a movie like Lord Of The Rings and though it is three or more hours long I love it. I do not feel as if I am stuck somewhere watching something I am not enjoying. With a series like Luke Cage which was thirteen episodes in length I came across a problem that I have never had with British TV series. A series like Luther starring Idris Elba has four seasons. On paper that sounds like a lot of TV to watch. Personally when I am about to ump into a show that has been on for a while I'll look at how many episodes there have been. Arrow has six seasons and 138 episodes. I won't even begin to watch just based on that number. Luther on the other hand has four seasons and 16 episodes. This is a great example of less being more.

When a series has a small or limited amount of time to build a story and/or characters time can not be wasted. Luther can not spend two episodes out of a four episode season killing time or god forbid having flashbacks to build what should have been shown during the series. On the other hand if you have twenty three episodes (which seems to be the CW average for their series) you can spend close to half of those doing whatever you feel other than building a main story arc or just plain good ol' fashioned good story. Luther has four episodes and not a single moment feels wasted. Flash, when I first watched an wrote about, was great. I absolutely loved that show and out of 23 episodes 22 were good. In the second season 22 episodes were bad and 1 was good.

Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch is another British series that has the same small amount formula but made the mistake of getting too big for its britches. It has four season with just three episodes each. There is no time to waste. Literally no time. So when season two ended up having two bad episodes and season three having three bad episodes people panicked. I did not know until recently that there was even a fourth season and for sure I'm not watching it. Sherlock took what people enjoyed from the first season and amplified it to cartoonish levels thereby nullifying its original intended impact. It would be as if Luther snapped in every episode. It works for certain shows/movies. You want to see Hulk turn green.

I want shows to have fewer episodes because I want no wiggle room for mistakes. I want to have such a full TV schedule that I stress out about it. If you have a hard time telling a story in 12 to 24 hours then that says more about your writers than anything else. You could say some of them may be apathetic towards their own work.