A confession: I have watched a total of three episodes of Better Call Saul, a show that quite a few people reckon is not only the best on TV, but also better than its beloved predecessor Breaking Bad. I loved Breaking Bad and I know that, given time, I’d love Better Call Saul too. And yet, in 2015, after struggling through a trio of expertly made but often glacial instalments of Better Call Saul’s first series, I put it to one side, and seven years, three US presidents and one planet-altering pandemic (perfect timing for catching up on TV, you would have thought) later, I still haven’t picked it up again.
Better Call Saul is not alone. I also abandoned Gomorrah, the Naples-set mafia drama, midway through its first season, turned off by how broadly drawn and basic it seemed compared with the Matteo Garrone film of the same name, also based on Roberto Saviano’s source material (plenty of Gomorrah fans have told me it gets much, much better in the following episodes and seasons). I limped through four episodes of Marvel’s loud, stern-faced, callback-heavy The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, after mistakenly thinking that, given I quite enjoyed Wandavision, I might like another Marvel show.
Even shows that I like have suffered a similar same fate: for some unknown reason I stopped watching Derry Girls midway through series two, despite hugely enjoying every episode I had seen. Comedies, lacking the propulsive plottiness of dramas, are particularly at risk of being prematurely shelved – I’m still only halfway through series three of Stath Lets Flats, despite it being comfortably the funniest show on TV. And often one show will get bumped for another, more gripping one – when Severance arrived a few months back, its sheer addictiveness pushed several other shows I’d been watching to the sidelines, and I still haven’t returned to them.
I’m sure I’m not alone in prematurely jettisoning series left and right. At a point when there’s more TV to watch than ever, and where that deluge of TV also has to vie with every other form of entertainment in existence, seeing a show through might not be the best use of one’s time. And certainly ditching a TV show halfway through a series doesn’t seem quite as dramatic an act as walking out of a movie early (more on that later) or, shame of all shames, giving up on a book. Still, it’s a big call to make – particularly if you’ve invested time and money into it.
Plenty of great shows started slowly, after all – Parks and Rec and, yes, Breaking Bad all had patchy first series that bore little relation to the classics they would become. The Wire begins in such an impenetrable fashion – with its inscrutable police slang, enormous cast of characters and labyrinthine plot – that Charlie Brooker (an early superfan of the series) had to write a guide to watching it. I’m sure tons of people gave up on it after a single episode – and what a mistake that would have been. Some dumped Succession in its early episodes too, turned off by the Roy family and their parallels with real-life scumbag elites. I’m sure many of those people have since returned to the show, after hearing so much breathless praise for it in the seasons since. But in doing so they’ve missed out on much of the weekly reactions, predictions, memes, recaps and other things that make watching the show so enjoyable.
They’ve probably had to sidestep a number of spoilers too – that’s the problem I’m currently facing with Better Call Saul. I do eventually plan on watching it, honest. I’ve just got a couple of other shows I should probably finish first …
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