quarter_to_five | December Meme: What do you look for in TV Shows?

I fought Tumblr and Tumblr won.

I think. It's hard to tell.

*confused*

December Meme to cheer me up!

What do I look for in TV Shows?

Honestly, I haven't a clue! At least, I can't put my finger on it. I like TV more than movies - again, I'm not sure why, as such, except that I clearly watch a lot of TV and very few movies.

One thing is that I like the immersion and continuity of a serialized show. Having this world and characters that I can drop by and visit again and again, and both have it be the same and watch it subtly evolve. I always get a bit of a kick when I see an early episode of some show and get that sense of, gosh, look how different it is now! Look how much they've changed without us noticing! So I sometimes get a little bored with shows that are all paradigm shift, all the time, where characters never really get to inhabit a particular more-or-less status-quo setting for a while. (I think it's one of the reasons I was never able to get into Orphan Black that much, despite it superficially ticking all my obvious boxes.)

Related to that, I love a good sense of place especially when the nature of the place is relevant to the story. I loved Broadchurch for the small town and cliffs-at-dawn porn. I loved The Bridge, with it's complicated border town setting. Northern Exposure or Gilmore Girls goes without saying, but I love things that celebrate cities too. I loved the sense of DS9 being this living, breathy, messy commercial port of a place, and I love anything that gets described as "the ship is practically a character," - Farscape, Firefly, etc.

I usually like a lot of big, complicated character dynamics. Anything that's too tightly focused, where it's just one or two characters, really, alone in the world, often quickly starts to feel a little limited and claustrophobic to me. (There are exceptions - early Supernatural, Remington Steele - but I usually delight and rejoice every time it seems like there might be another recurring character there.)

Humor is also crucial. I have a short attention span. If something is too relentlessly serious, it's just going to lose me. Little hits of humor are what actually keeps me looking at the screen and not wandering off to make a cup of tea and get some work done and leave it to run in the background.

If there's some combination of that, being done well, I'll usually manage to stumble on through whatever else is wrong with a show, be it shoddy plotting or irritating characters or what. (well, to an extent.) There are other story-tropes I gravitate to, obviously, but I'll look for "people driving themselves mad" or "people settling into normal lives" or "messing around with perception of gender" in any medium, always. This is particular to television, I guess.