Cross-posted on Robert David Sullivan blog.
Jaime Weinman tackles a point of modern TV etiquette:
..now that TV series are taken more seriously as complete and coherent works, to say nothing of the fact that we can watch from the beginning no matter how late we discover the show, there’s an increased preference for getting the full experience of the story from beginning to end. Even where the show deals mostly or partly in self-contained stories, like Justified or almost any half-hour comedy, many new viewers prefer to start from episode one.
I think there are two tiny groups of people who fall into the start-from-the-beginning camp. First are the fans of certain genres (like soap operas and science fiction) that encourage a sense of belonging to a club where the price of admission is knowing everything about the characters. Second are TV buffs like myself who are fascinated by the creative process of putting together a series and guiding its evolution. If I think a series will interest me, I like to start from the beginning in the same way that a Red Sox fan likes to watch spring training games or a symphony season-ticket holder might like to attend rehearsals. It's fun to see the mistakes and uncertainty, then to watch everything come together when it counts.
But most people don't watch TV that way. As Weinman explains (and you should read his whole essay from the beginning):
you hear about a TV show and check it out. (Or you just accidentally come across it and keep watching.) You are aware that you’re not watching from the beginning and that the characters are talking about things that are unfamiliar to you, but you keep going, and eventually you know what the show is about and who these people are and what they want. And then, suddenly, you find you’re hooked. You not only want to watch every episode from now on, you want to catch up with the ones you missed.
What goes unsaid here is that most of the time, you check out a show and decide that one episode is more than enough, thank you. We've probably all had the experience of recommending a TV series to a friend, who then watches a relatively weak or atypical episode and decides: I am NEVER watching that show again.
That's why a lot of series that like to vary tone and structure are at such a disadvantage. Casual viewers watch a particular episode (a "bottle episode" like Breaking Bad's "Fly" or a Sopranos episode with a dream sequence) and decide that every episode is going to be similar — which is reasonable, given that most TV series do repeat themselves with little variation. Saying "most episodes aren't like this" usually elicits great skepticism; it also reinforces the idea that it was a bad episode, even when that's not the case.
The point is that you generally get one shot at getting someone interested in a series, and picking the wrong episode can be a fatal mistake. And since most shows are not at their best in the first episode, starting from the beginning is not always a good idea. Indeed, starting from the first season can backfire. I'm convinced that some classic TV series will never be fully released on DVD because their first seasons are their weakest, leading new viewers to wonder, "People liked this?" (Barney Miller and St. Elsewhere are two prime examples. The first was too broad and too heavy on ethnic jokes before Steve Landesberg mercifully replaced Abe Vigoda and the humor became more nuanced, and the second didn't really earn its reputation for boundary-pushing until David Birney was dropped as the lead.)
My advice is to sample a series by looking for its high point, then going back to the beginning (the "prequel") if it interests you. If you've never seen Seinfeld, start with "The Contest"; there's no need to see the pilot episode, which bears little resemblance to the show at its peak, unless you're a completist. Or feel free to jump around to a series' most famous stand-alone episodes; that's what I did with The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose continuing storylines never interested me.
Some shows with strong continuing plots — such as The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Breaking Bad — are indeed worth watching from the start. But just the thought of sitting through 86 hours of a single TV series has been enough to dissuade some of my acquaintences from giving The Sopranos a chance. So I tell them to just watch "College" or "Whitecaps" and take things from there.
Just as a great TV series doesn't depend solely on the recognition of pop-culture references, it doesn't depend solely on plot twists and surprises. Knowing how The Sopranos ends shouldn't prevent you from enjoying (or re-enjoying) some great episodes throughout the show's run. (I wonder if that's partly why creator David Chase crafted a series finale that — oh, OK, I'll skip the spoilers this time.) So don't worry about starting at the beginning; just start with the best.
