Television is now a year-round enterprise of “whenever, wherever” (per Shakira), yet I'm still excited to watch the broadcast network premieres each September. After several years of evaluating programming and putting these schedules together, I have a pretty quick reaction to what I’m watching.
Part of this is understanding the track record: most shows fail, and I watch fully aware that most new shows won’t make it past their first season. Critics become jaded because they've seen too many that don't work, and I'm also easily frustrated by shows that feel manufactured, flailing their plot and music wildly to keep a rock afloat that’s simply meant to sink. But I also remind myself that they started as an idea in a writer’s head, an idea they expanded into a story and then a world with characters they hoped would live on in the public’s minds as well. For every nameless cop drama there's Twin Peaks and Breaking Bad, for every groaning sitcom there's Seinfeld and Friends. The fact that multiple companies spend billions of dollars a year to create stories for people to enjoy, even if it’s for commercial reasons, is amazing.
And while we move toward the moment when Netflix downloads full series directly into our brains, I still enjoy watching television unfold around the watercooler (and the internet), week-by-week. If we've learned anything from social media, it’s that people like to share themselves, but they also like to share excitement. That doesn’t happen when ten million people post selfies, it happens when ten million people decide which image, video, article, music, movie, or show they like. People even get excited to not like content (internet, meet trolls), as long as they do it together.
I won’t be rooting for shows to crash, even if I know which ones will, and I’ll be giving each one a fair shot, even if that means I meet thirty sets of characters I’ve seen many times over. The odds are against success, but the odds are also for it once in awhile. I like to be there for those moments, to marvel at the ability of a creative team to once again reinvent the wheel, put some fancy rims on it, or when we’re really lucky, throw the wheels out altogether and give us a hoverboard.
