As a person who, when I catch up on a TV show (or watch one for the first time), sees no problem going back to season 1, episode 1 and experiencing the show all over again from the beginning with the added context that future episodes and seasons have provided, I’d like to introduce you to several shows I have watched multiple times in a row in 2022 alone (maybe light spoilers?):
Grey’s Anatomy
Not from the beginning, obviously. Grey’s, which starts its 19th season this fall, has been on the air for 54 percent of my life. I have never done a complete rewatch of this show. What I have done, though, is identify which story arcs make me feel the way I want to feel, then I watch those, then realize I want to see the aftermath of that drama, so I keep watching until, inevitably, I’ve reached the present day. (I have rewatched the COVID storyline three times. I know. I am not okay.)
Stranger Things
I worried when the Season 4 premiere date was announced that I would need to rewatch Seasons 1–3 to reorient myself (get it? the upside down?). I remembered the basics of each season: kid gets abducted to weird alternate world; same kid deals with ramifications of coming back from weird alternate world (feat. Sean Astin, who comes a little too close to eliminating Sean Astin’s 1980s existence); communists in the mall. Naturally, after I watched what has been released of Season 4 (and was taken in by the story enough to not realize what references and characters I’d forgotten), I backtracked to Season 1 and watched the entire show. And then again. This is my most recent curse. I know. I am not okay.
The 100
It is difficult to express how I feel when I connect with another person who has seen The 100. Like, yes! Please! Let’s talk about this! But I’m also someone who is very much a fan of teen dystopian fiction, and I think it speaks to a lot of my own idiosyncrasies. When the adults come down to Earth for the first time in Season 2, for example, and they’re just making it up as they go, totally unaware (and not super caring) that their kids know how to navigate the world, that they’ve attempted to establish diplomacy, that dozens of their own are currently trapped in the place the adults thought they might be living right now — anyway, as someone who is very much into Things Being a Certain Way and who is often anxious about change, that storyline very much spoke to me, that of Knowing the World versus being totally new to the world. I also am just really happy that Eliza Taylor and Bob Morley are an IRL couple. I have not watched the last season of The 100 because I know how it goes and I do not like it. Not to the level of refusing to acknowledge Season 4 of Veronica Mars, as I do (related: I didn’t hate Season 3, but I understand those who do not acknowledge it either), but I just feel like I’m going to get mega-depressed. Sometimes I ask to be mega-depressed. Most of the time, I do not.
Never Have I Ever
Random Never Have I Ever memory: Ordering GoPuff while watching Season 1 in 2020 and having a soda from my order explode all over myself and my bed. Thinking about how the third season of Never Have I Ever drops in August: What a fun excuse to watch this show multiple times in its entirety in preparation! (Again!)
This is an entry in my 30 Day blogging challenge. Read the first post explaining it here, or see all the posts in the challenge here.
Onward and Eastward 