Do you re-watch dramatic TV shows?

I've rewatched LOST a couple of times.

Early DEXTER seasons several times.

Lot of shows like NCIS I can only watch once.

 

I rewatch The Fugitive, Combat, the half hour Gunsmoke, Rockford, The Virginian, Wagon Train, Maverick, HGWT, Alias Smith & Jones, Johnny Staccato, Columbo, Ellery Queen every few years

 

To clarify: I was referring more to post-Sopranos 1999 TV dramas so things like Star Trek (1987-1994) with standalone episodes and little to no arcs are not what I was specifically referring to. They are worth discussing here but note that it's long form novelistic arc TV programming I can't imagine re-watching. Traditional standalone broadcast style TV programmes like Star Trek and X-Files I could dip in and out of without much problem. Though even then, in the last 10 or so years I can't recall doing that with any non-comedy TV shows.

I watched a specific episode of X-Files (the one about the guy with incredible luck). It didn't inspire me to watch a second episode.

Years ago I re-watched House M.D. season 1-4 on DVD. I stopped there as I didn't have access to the rest (the iffy last seasons I probably wouldn't have re-watched anyway). That show has some arc stuff but it's mostly standalone problem of the week stuff.

I know two people who have re-watched Breaking Bad seasons 1-5 and yet both gave up on Better Call Saul because it was too slow. To me the time spent re-watching BB would have been better spent watching BCS for the first time.

If The Wire was one or two seasons I could probably be talked into re-watching it to pick up the complex stuff I missed. 5 seasons is far too much. There is a lot to be said for concise running times.

I can’t imagine even re-watching a 10 episode mini-series like Band of Brothers. Just too much material.

PS Why I haven't seen Twin Peaks season 2 was due to a circa 5 year delay between 1 and 2 being released on DVD in the UK. When my dad eventually bought it my interest had gone and bad reviews put me off. I currently have no interest in seeing it.

 

This is what my original opening post is about. Post-1999 stuff is great (usually better than comparable films) but they go on for so many, many, many, many hours. Also they have bloated sub-plots that ultimately don't add anything important and will be tedious on second viewing. I can't imagine watching them again despite how good they are.


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I’m curious if anyone ever re-watched six seasons of The L Word? If so, I’m impressed.

That was a profoundly messy programme. A total car crash of abruptly curtailed plotlines, very weird artistic decisions, a completely redundant lead character (heterosexual Pam Grier was shoehorned into every single episode with utterly irrelevant and tedious sub-plots when she should have been written out after she served her purpose in the first episodes) etc. etc. etc. but it was sometimes a fun soap anyway. It was a very, very bumpy ride on first viewing but I could overlook or suffer the endless flaws. If you could accept that incompetence on a second viewing then you are an even greater surrealist than René Magritte (and let’s not talk about Jenny’s surrealistic writing scenes as depicted by an idiot who has no understanding of surrealism).

 

Yeah...if I had more time I might feel otherwise. My day job has been working for TV networks, for nearly fifteen years, as a side effect I have watched way too many series in general, and am feeling burned out. These days increasingly I feel, give me a one-and-done two hour movie, or at best a limited series that I know won't drag on (potentially with diminishing returns) for several years.

That being said, someone above mentioned The Wire, I could see a rewatch of that one day because it's fairly dense, and each season does kind of feel like a thing-unto-itself. But there's still certain favorite drama series of mine that, while a re-watch could give me an even greater appreciation for the craft in how it was put together, I just don't know if I want to go on those emotional rides again.

 

I rewatch NOTHING.

 

I would agree that there are some downsides to the increased serialization of TV shows, despite the quality of many of them. The problem with the idea that a series should be like a long movie broken into pieces, is that most of the time nobody knows how long a show is going to last, so you end up with a story that has a long long flabby middle full of dead ends and spinning wheels, and episodes that don’t really have any shape because all they do is move a big story the tiniest bit forward. I’ve realized that the old fashioned conception of a TV show — a basically static situation in which self contained stories happen each week — had its virtues too. Certainly it made more sense for the medium as it was in the 20th century, where people didn’t binge shows and often missed episodes or watched them out of sequence. But even now there is something satisfying about a well-crafted TV episode that isn't dependent on the installments before and after it.

 

I rewatch films and TV.
Penny Dreadful, West Wing, Six Feet Under, Twin Peaks, The Wire, Band of Brothers three times each I would say. I Claudius countless times, as well as a lot of other classic period dramas: Austen, Brontës, Le Carré, the Sherlock Holmes stories with Jeremy Brett adaptations, lots more besides.
All DVDs in my collection.
I won't see Game of Thrones 8 till it appears on BluRay. I may well watch it in its entirety then.

 

That is a problem that's still with us. What I don't get is why this should be so on streaming platforms. Streamers like Netflix pre-order a whole season (or more) in advance, which should mean that the showrunners have a guaranteed run of episodes per season in which to tell a well rounded story. And yet there is still flab in many series. The Netflix Marvel shows being the most egregious example.

I think the problem is that often the showrunners have the opposite problem to the one you described - they have too many episodes (even with shorter seasons) to tell a specific story (again, Neflix/Marvel).

In these situations, what I think would help is for each season to have a self-contained story, with a beginning, middle and an end, told over however many episodes are needed for a tight narrative. If another season is ordered, you do likewise with a different story, but with connective tissue elements to the previous season/events. A show like Line Of Duty does this very well.

 

I have only done it with The Sopranos