Binge Notes

turned-on flat screen television

I and the missus recently finished the final season of Modern Family, and it’s left a void in our casual TV watching experience. We tried to fill it with a series of shows but nothing has come close to the wonderful nature of Modern Family – funny, yet familial.

We tried watching The Office and Parks and Rec, but we’re both not really fans of this style of comedy. MF was an interesting exception, because it focused more on the story than on the explanation. We’ve tried to watch Community separately before, and didn’t ever feel like we want to watch it.

We binged on Mirzapur (on Prime Video) and it is a horrible show. I can’t believe that the entire premise is just shock and gore. There even is an instance in the show where a character waits for a second, before shooting someone in the head and then commenting, partly to the audience as much as to the other characters in the scene, “that he was waiting to give everyone false hope”. Just a crass show overall. The ending was a nod to The Godfather, but while the story is good, the direction falls much, much short of what you’d expect from this sort of a tale.

We watched a show called Hunters, and it’s good, with quirky asides (a la The Good Fight), and casual references to comic books, but it’s a sad show overall. Clearly, our hope of replacing Modern Family with another feel-good show is failing miserably.

We watched the latest season of West World, but anything from HBO has become nothing more than a ritual. After what they did with Game of Thrones, any time they produce a good show, there’s that underlying wonder of how they’ll tank this one.

We tried to watch the latest season of Dead To Me (Netflix), but it’s just a sad show – a shell of what the first season was. Also, we’ve had enough of irritating characters from another show we’re watching – Station 19. It’s good for the most part, but their lead character is just horrible, selfish, and best kept off-screen for the most part. We’re both in agreement on that. Hence, when such a character surfaced in Dead To Me, we stopped watching the show.

We also watched the latest season of Four More Shots Please, but again, it’s more ritual than active watching, because while the story is feel-good in moments, those moments are fleeting.

Finally, we’ve landed on two shows which will give us a short-lived happy-time – Kim’s Convenience, and Derry Girls, both are on Netflix, and both are funny, quirky, and wholesome.

Anybody have any good recommendations, please?

Reverse Instant Gratification

More than a month ago, I subscribed my wife to some print magazines. We’ve never had those lying around at our home here (newspapers and magazines were common in India) and I just thought it might be a good addition to her media diet. Ever since, every few days, she asks me what the status of the magazines is. The problem is that print magazines have ridiculous starting dates for new subscriptions. The promised first set is not going to arrive till the end of April. This is just weird. I did some digging and found out that print magazines run on a thin budget for subscriptions and so the process to add someone to the list and publish specifically for them is a long-drawn out process. Or it’s just a scam so they can get you into the next year’s subscription for an exorbitant price. Whatever.

But a week ago, one of the magazines showed up. It was a special edition which was already in print. That was nice of them, I thought. Perhaps it was an additional copy and they decided to send it to people who’d recently signed up. It being a nice surprise, Jahanvi settled in to read it one evening. Within forty-five minutes, she was done. Most of the magazine was ads and the rest was fluff. Didn’t take her long to parse through.

The same evening, we were watching one of her favorite TV shows. It comes on Hulu and trickles down one episode at a time, on weeks they deign us viewers important enough to shower their little trinkets on us. After the episode finished and the end-advert rolled, what was left was a bad taste in the mouth, a hankering for more. In the world of Netflix, Plex Media Server, and Amazon Prime Video, we’re stuck with Hulu and real-time TV. Pathetic.

That’s when we started discussing this topic – reverse instant gratification. In an age of instant gratification, when we give our time and attention to something that doesn’t reciprocate in the same way, that thing is getting the gratification that we ought to be deriving from it. When the magazine came, it was read instantly and we have to now wait patiently for the next. When the episode aired, we devoured it, and were left smacking our lips at the aftertaste of that carefully crafted forty-one minute drama. We gave to those things, the Reverse Instant Gratification that we feel we deserve from them. The system is RIGged! 🙂

Such is the state of affairs. We, the consumers, the binge watchers, the devourers of CDNs, are sometimes left hat in hand, begging for morsels of things running too live for our taste. It’s unfair! It’s unjust! It’s a mockery of everything Netflix holds dear! Just putting that out there.