Unpopular Entertainment Opinions • Page 465

With my Star Trek: Voyager watch I got real micro and weird about it.

First I did all the important overarching main series arc episodes. Then after that I would pick a reoccurring antagonist or villanous race and watched all their episodes in order. Then I would pick a main character and do all of their centric story arc episodes in order. After that I honestly didn't have much filler left.

 

Aight cant dig you out of that one

 

I think I picked that up because back in the day when Star Trek was on Hulu they had curated watchists for every major character centric episode, villain, and storybeat, and I was into that and just started doing that on my own.

 

But seriously, while I do get it on some level, it's hard for me to wrap my head around, because I feel like if the filler is good enough, it doesn't feel like filler and colors in the characters so that when major stuff happens, it hits harder. Or to me it does, anyway.

 

It's not like I ignore the filler. I just watch it casually later after I watched the major storybeat stuff first.

Some of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's best ever episodes were technically filler.

 

I just watch the show

 

I just disagree with the method. I think it's better to just watch a show in order. But as long as you're enjoying yourself.

 

Some really good long-running episodic shows have really really rough first couple seasons before they find their stride (80's/90's Trek perfect example) My method saves you the hours of pain waiting for it to get good. Then you can go back and watch the not very great early episodes when you're bored and don't have anything else go watch

I will convert some of ya'll to my ways.

 

you do you but the one thing I don’t think you can say for these methods is that they’re easier than just pressing play on season 1 episode 1 and going from there

 

This isn't crazy and you should publish your playlists.
Unfortunately I can't sign up because unless I get depression I don't plan to ever watch a long television series again.

 

It is a weird thing to talk about because the creators of those old shows couldn't really imagine binging or even that many people trying to see everything sequentially. Those 22 episode a year shows were "content" and they were worried about selling ad space and getting renewed. That isn't to say they are all bad and that they didn't try, but it is less important to see every episode of Cheers in order than it is to see every episode of The Sopranos in order.

We all kind of accept that 2/3 of the Simpsons isn't worth watching so why not hit the highlight reel on other shows to get a sense of its cultural impact and importance and then move on?

 

Right, but he's doing this with shows that are very clearly not that.

 

ER and Berman era Star Trek (besides maybe DS9 to an extent) were that though.

Like with ER there are loose seasonal arcs and some character arcs that carry over, but it's not as sequential as prestige tv that came after it.

 

I never watched ER, so I can't comment. TNG had a lot of standalone episodes, it's true, but it didn't have no continuity.

 

Yes but it was a loose continuity. Not similar to something like a Sopranos/The Wire.

There would be standalone episodes on TNG that called back to plotpoints from earlier standalone or two parter episodes years prior. That was TNG's continuity.

 

Yes? That's continuity. Yeah, it's not an episode-to-episode storyline, but it's still relying on previous events to inform new events.