All Together, Now?
I’m wondering if perhaps it’s time to make a shift in my television-viewing and comic-reading habits. Rather than indulging episodically, I’d wait for collections, on DVD of the former and in GN (graphic novel) of the latter. I could consume at my leisure. I’d be better assured of overall quality, since well-reviewed and received shows/books have a better chance to be collected. I’d avoid the aggravating and distracting ads. Plus, the ending is right there, whenever I get to it.
One downside is that a good show or book might get cancelled for lack of support if everybody did that. Yet plenty of good books and shows have gotten cancelled even when I did watch them, which only made me more sad when they left me at odds and ends. Often, things get cancelled because they deserve it. Waiting for collections would mean I’d never waste time gambling on duds.
The more serious downside I see is the delay until a collection appears. If a series has a lot of surprises, this leaves more room for spoilage. But the time till collection is getting shorter both for DVDs and GNs, so the benefits are sounding better all the time.
March 1st, 2005 at 4:00 pm
I do this. I didn’t have cable access and/or t.v. when the Sopranos were introduced, or Buffy or Alias. It was easier to get them in a lump and consume them like mad. I watched four seasons of Buffy in a month, got it out of my system, and moved on. I hate jumping into a series in the middle and this is a perfect solution.
March 1st, 2005 at 4:53 pm
do you think they’ll put out DVDs of ‘life as we know it’ ?
March 1st, 2005 at 4:59 pm
I doubt that they’ll collect Life as we know it because of its low ratings and likely cancellation. There are a few newsbits here about it:
http://www.tvtome.com/LifeasWeKnowIt/
Then again, the short-lived, low-rated and cancelled show Undeclared is going to be collected, supporting my idea that the good stuff gets collected.
March 1st, 2005 at 5:02 pm
Tammy, I don’t know where you ended with Buffy watching, but I wish I had only watched to the end of Season 5. Seasons 6 & 7 were painful diminishments of a show that I’d previously loved, and watching to the end still gave me no closure. If I’d stopped at the end of 5, I feel I would have had good closure to a good show.
March 2nd, 2005 at 9:59 am
Welcome to the club! I have recently made this resolution with comics. Factors that convinced me to wait for a GN collection over buying single issues were (a) no obnoxious ads every couple pages; (b) the GN was usually printed on better quality paper, and with the cover was in general a better physical product for handling during reading; (c) in some cases it cost less than the sum of the collected issues; and the one the really swayed me (d) GN collections often contain material that was not included in the single issues, such as story scripts, initial character sketches, writer introductions that provide more insight, or brief stories that originally appeared in other comics.
March 2nd, 2005 at 1:58 pm
Erik, I just said I was considering it; I have yet to make the leap. There are a couple titles that I started reading in GN like Daredevil and Y the Last Man so I have continued with those, but am still reading single issues of everything else like 100 Bullets, Gotham Central, Queen and Country. I liked the GN of Ex MAchina so much that I picked up the subsequent single issues, though. The funny thing is that, unbeknownst to you, YOU were one of the reasons I started thinking about it, because Blogenheimer mentioned your thoughts on it. You make excellent points. I think if money and time were not scarce resources, I’d buy both. Buy the single issues as they came out, then re-read story arcs when they were collected. Given the sometimes considerable time lapses in releases for single issues, I often need to re-read as a reminder anyway. But since I don’t have unlimited time and funds, I am swayed toward the collections more and more.