I Hope You're Happy, Internet

brevoortformspring:

Yes, I do. A new viewer may not understand every aspect of every relationship, but go back and watch any random episode and pay attention to just how often the characters’ names and relationships are stated and re-stated within the context of each episode. Sure, to get the full picture, you might want to go back and watch the whole thing, but a television series, like a comic book series, picks up readers by hooking them as it goes. How many of those Breaking Bad viewers do you think started with the first episode?

Going out on a limb to say that with Netflix/iTunes/Amazon/DVDs/constant reruns that the vast majority of them did.

Even sitcoms don’t really run by the old 1980s comic rules of having the scene where Walter White recaps his origin story (lung cancer) or his superpowers (super meth cooking) in the first act. I’m reasonably sure entire episodes pass without any mention of how Jesse Pinkman was his entry point into meth cooking, or that he was his former student, or that ASAC Hank Schraeder is his brother-in-law.

To use a more episodic example, I’m trying to remember the last time an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia explicitly stated that Dennis and Sweet Dee are siblings, or that they grew up assuming that Frank is their father, never mind the fact that he is not in fact their biological father, never mind the fact that he is almost certainly Charlie’s biological dad even though they live together and sleep on the same hide-a-bed. I guess some of that is not germane to a given week’s story, and they establish quickly that there are five terrible humans who own (or at least loiter in) a bar, and that’s really all that is important from week-to-week, even when jokes rely on the secondary knowledge base I mentioned.

In the past it was unrealistic to expect someone to start with the first issue/episode of a story. With collected and digital editions, it’s unrealistic to assume anyone wants to jump in blindly after several years of storytelling.

I admit i do not know where this conversation started, and in terms of “homework” I think there’s a huge difference between “watch the first season of Homeland" or "read the first Harry Potter book” and the sort of homework some comic books require, a la “if you want to follow New Avengers v2 #13 read all of Avengers v5 and New Avengers v2 #1-12 and also the core issues of Infinity in the proper order and you might want to check out these Inhumanity one-shots and also you might want to check out Fantastic Four #570-588 and then also #600-611 and actually 589-599 don’t exist because they’re labeled FF #1-12 but FF continues and runs parallel with F4 #600-611 but read them consecutively because they cross over and honestly you might want to pick up Dark Reign Fantastic Four because it leads into both F4 and NA. No, you don’t really need to read Dark Reign but you might want to check out AvX for more context regarding…”

There are no hidden arcs of Mad Men or Community or Northern Exposure you need to watch in order to understand the fourth season of Breaking Bad, but you definitely might want to watch the first three seasons, and I think people understand that.