How Many Episodes Should You Watch Before Quitting a TV Show? | Hacker News Reader

How Many Episodes Should You Watch Before Quitting a TV Show?

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5 pointssebg5 comments

Seinfeld's experience is interesting. I'll admit that the first half of season 1 was bad but, thereafter, it gained strength which lasted to the end (less the two-part finale). Of course, there were clinkers but surprisingly few, ever after Larry David left. As to the first episodes, I'll attribute that to the actors getting to know their roles, developing their styles and their quirks and how they interact with one another. The goes for the writers. Someone who bailed that first year, missed some great comedy.

I feel like if you have to ask, it’s time to stop watching it and move on to something else.. free time is too precious to waste on mediocre content when there’s so much good stuff out there.

For a lot of shows now, I just wait for the show to finish and look/ask around for the best first season episodes to watch.

I watch those and then if I like the show I’ll watch a few more but most of the time they don’t hold my interest so much when I’m not being drip fed new episodes.

I watch virtually no live TV now but do like to catch up with NBC shows on Peacock the next day for a couple things.

I’ve started buying DVDs again in the last few months. I have lots of stuff in my queue to watch.

I'm personally done with watching new TV shows. They take way to long to get to the point. So much filler time from networks trying to maximize minutes on their platform. Will only be watching old TV shows or watching movies

I think you might prefer "prestige TV" from the streaming services. They're not trying to fill air time, so they tend to be shorter. They're not ad driven; they just want to have enough content that you keep subscribing.

To be sure, no one streaming service is likely to give you as much good content as you'd like. They're hoping that one good show at a time will keep you subscribed. (They have much, much, much more content, and somebody is watching each of them, but each one appeals to only a smallish set of subscribers.)

The other upside is that they generally keep things around. So if you're willing to watch not-still-being-made shows, you can just binge the content and maybe even drop the service after that.

Anyway... I'm watching Severance, and I think it's pretty great. Probably not enough to convince you to subscribe to AppleTV, but it's one example of a show that gets only 9 episodes per season, so it has to get to its point fairly fast.

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