I have a problem. I recently developed a love-hate relationship with TV shows, books and movies that come in a series.
Don’t get me wrong – when a new TV show comes out and I watch the first episode and then continue to watch it every week from that point on, it’s not so bad. Same goes for books and movies, except that would be every year or so.
But when someone tells me about a show/book/movie series that they’ve liked for years now that they think is really good, and that I should watch it, I get stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I like to explore new things; they give me the opportunity to discover everything that is out there. The thing that I don’t like is having to catch up. It takes forever. Especially if this show/book/movie series has been out for, let’s say, seven years.
This past summer, I decided to start watching a show called “How I Met Your Mother” – a show that has been running since 2005. I somehow managed to catch up on seven seasons – thank you, Netflix – in less than a month, between working, eating and sleeping. I don’t have many hobbies.
But now with school in session, work, eating, sleeping, homework and all of the clubs and activities I’m involved in, I don’t have time to become obsessed with a new show/book/movie series. But the call to do so is so tempting.
I can’t understand why I don’t just start to watch/read a series when it first comes out. It could be partially due to the fact that I don’t do any research on a series when I first see it advertised. Also, I was definitely too young to understand “How I met Your Mother” when it first aired.
But say I wanted to re-watch every episode of “Friends,” or read every book in the “Pretty Little Liars” series – yeah, they’re books. That would take up most of my time for the next few months, and I would more than likely not have any friends by the end of it.
Maybe this isn’t necessarily true for a movie series. Movies generally only take about three hours at the most to watch. But for movies in general, people are usually shocked by the amount of movies I haven’t watched. I have a laundry list of movies that I haven’t watched that people say I “need” to see, as well as movies that haven’t been released yet that I definitely want to see (i.e. “The Hobbit”). It would probably take me a few days to watch all of them, if I had a marathon of it.
Movies aside, though, I definitely feel the pull to watch several new-to-me series that people have told me are fantastic. But when will I have time to catch up on all of these things? A three-day weekend definitely won’t be enough.
So I guess I will just have to keep a list of shows to watch, books to read and movies to see, and then do my best to watch as many as I can over Christmas break. We’ll see how well that goes.
Until then I will probably give in to one or two types of series and replace a few more hours of sleep with coffee. Hopefully it will be worth it.
