Goodreads Bookshelf
Judging TV
A thought occurred to me a while ago: most people probably wouldn't say "Wow, such-and-such-a-book is my favorite book, even though I'm only halfway through it," but many of us would easily say "Lost is my favorite TV show" or "Battlestar Galactica is my favorite" or whatever, even though we don't know yet how it turns out. Wouldn't it make a difference to us if it turned out that Lost is just a dream or... well, whatever it turns out to be? Won't our final judgment depend somewhat on how things turn out? Much like my final judgment of the Matrix series--which was positive after the first installment but later... not so much--depended on the totality.
I suppose the format of TV tends toward that sort of thing. This, though, is why at least one of my friends is starting to question his love of Battlestar Galactica as the series comes closer and closer to the end. He's concerned that many plot points over the years will have been left up in the air as the writers seem not to always have had a strong overall vision. BSG may just be a series where the writing of particular episodes--many of them--was brilliant, but we may well decide after Friday's finale that the series as a whole lacked something.
So I suspect that when we talk about our gushy positive feelings toward a TV show, we really mean different things depending on whether the show is still in progress or whether it's finished. Your thoughts?