This feels like a question specifically tailored to an earlier time in television, back when syndication was king, serialization was reserved only for the soapiest of shows, and no one could envision our current “Here’s all 11 seasons of Frasier, just a click away” digital binge-scape. Unsurprising, then, that the first show I thought of is one I fell in love with back when I was a kid, when reruns of Newhart began popping up on local TV, introducing me to poor, put-upon innkeeper Dick Loudon and his host of Green Acres-but-way-more-clever neighbors. When Nick At Nite began airing the show in 1997, I was shocked to discover its bizarre-by-not-being-at-all-bizarre first season, which was not only shot on video (in contrast to the rest of the series), but which also totally inverted the series’ format by making Dick’s occasional weirdo neighbors the exception, rather than the rule. As a fan of “Bob Newhart is the last sane man in the universe,” I appreciate coming to the show late; those latter seasons are a lot more fun, and I don’t know if I would have given that normcore initial impression a second chance. [William Hughes]
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I started watching Buffy with Season 6.I have no problems with the last two seasons.These facts are likely related.
So do they ever learn to act? That’s one of the things that has stopped me from getting into the series.
I still think the last two seasons are underrated. I guess to a lot of people it just didn’t feel like quite the same show; but how could it, with the characters developing as they did?
Also, magic crack.
I don’t see any of Season 6 as even slightly inferior to any other season. That also applies to each individual episode. Then I did start it in mid Season 5. I also love Dawn.
They work better binged than they did watching week-to-week. Not as good as the peak, but rarely awful.
My Buffy opinion as it stands is that not a single villain mattered after the mayor. Season 4 and on have good stand alone episodes, but most of the over all story arcs are “too much”.
I’ll maintain the nerds were great villains. Not only did they subvert the power creep, but they were fleshed out characters and had a menacing familiarity (as we all know guys like them).The show was way ahead of its time with them.
Jesus, those guys were “incels” before that was even a word.
Season 4 is probably the 2nd or 3rd best season. Also the season 4 story arc is pretty lame. I agree, it can be both things.
Buffy Seasons Ranked:3 > 6 > 2 > 4 > 5 > 1 > 7.You’re welcome.
Heck yeah, Happy Endings.
I saw two S2 episodes, half of S1, and then all of the last season. I’ll see it all in order when I get hulu plus (living outside the States).
I started watching Lost at season 3 and had to get a Netflix (mail-order DVD) subscription to catch up.
Homicide: Life on the street. I originally caught it on the CourtTV reruns (the show was in its last season at the time, I think.)Anyway, I started somewhere in season 3, and quit somewhere early in season 7. Then I bought the box set, but still haven’t bothered with that last season or the movie.
Once Game of Thrones is over, I intend to watch it starting in the middle of season 3 (or whatever ends up being the midpoint of the series), then watch the episode before that one, then the episode after the one I started with, then the episode two before the one I started with, then the episode two after the one I started with, and so on.I figure this will work perfectly fine, and is actually how the series is intended to be watched.
Ah, the Christopher Nolan order. I can see that working.
I’ve seen exactly one episode of that show, where the Mountain fights a guy and crushes his head with his bare hands. Needless to say I was intrigued but never picked it up in earnest.
Now imagine that happening to characters you actually like that normally have tons of plot armor and that is the first 3 or 4 seasons of GOT.
What about something that was intentionally made out of order, like Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya?Speaking of which,
WHERE THE FUCK IS SEASON 3? IT’S BEEN ALMOST 15 YEARS NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hey, at least it’s anime. The characters aren’t going to age out of their roles.
Lupin III has a voice actor who’s been playing the part for *49* years.
I think a certain set of 8 episodes which were made in order probably helped kill it, fun as the idea of them was.
I came to Homicide: Life on the Streets late. I also started Davinci’s Inquest in the middle of its run when it was airing at like 1 AM in syndication here in the US.
Davinci’s Inquest!!! The first episode I saw was the one where Davinci figures out the guy accidentally killed his upstairs neighbor by pulling on his satellite dish cord. That show, man. I bought seasons 1 – 3 on DVD … then the CBC or Alcon Media (assholes) worked their syndication deal AND NEVER RELEASED ANY MORE SEASONS TO THIS DAY! Guys! I would collect these!Anyway, I think they were an early adopter of digital-only episode-by-episode sales. (There’s a great 2-parter where Matt Frewer guests as a serial killer that is as scary as any catch-the-killer procedural ever put on TV. Any Matt Frewer fans out there should check it out.)The show is fantastic. It’s like the great uncle to Dexter, The Wire, & SVU … with X-Files and BSG actors guest starring while the shows were all filming in Vancouver. Definitely deserves a Renaissance. I’m going to go look for it now, as I do whenever someone brings it up. Maybe Amazon or someone has it.
The characters are compelling, the plots stretch over multiple season arcs, and eventually it becomes Davinci’s City Hall, which itself was awesome (followed by a movie – Davinci’s City Hall :Quality of Life)! It clearly pushed some lines too- lots of bleeped profanity and whatnot when it aired in syndication. I’d gladly buy a boxed set of the whole series!!
Man, I love DaVinci’s Inquest, which I also came across in syndication and thus watched completely out of order. There is a level of realism to Nicholas Campbell’s performance that I haven’t seen in any other TV show. I am continually astonished at the crap that comes out on DVD or Blu-ray while the DVD output of DaVinci’s Inquest, a big enough hit that it ran for 7 seasons and spawned the sequel series DaVinci’s City Hall, sputtered out after Season 3 (when it was still very much episodic and the serial elements hadn’t taken the focus as they would in later seasons). I contacted Acorn Media to inquire about whether they would ever put out more DVD sets of the show, and they said sales were so poor they couldn’t afford to license and manufacture any more of it. So I’ve had to resort to illegally downloading the rest of the series, all of which are rips of the syndicated broadcasts and are edited for time and language.I never managed to see Quality of Life. How does that compare to the TV shows?
Great. It sets him up as a contender for Premier. THAT would have been interesting.The syndication cuts of most shows break my heart, but none moreso than this one. I’d kill to see HBO or someone buy the rights and air it late at night unedited.
Twin Peaks. I was probably too young to start watching it, and I just dropped in the middle of the first season. Suddenly, this weirdo is cutting up his face with a garden tool. Much like Homer, I enjoyed what I was watching but had no idea what was going on.
Great Simpsons reference
The first episode I ever watched of The Prisoner was ‘Many Happy Returns’. In that episode Number Six wakes up to an empty island, builds a raft and leaves the island. I had heard so much about this series where an ex-Secret Agent is trying to get off this mysterious island and in the very first episode I watch he escapes almost immediately. He of course ends up on the island again and because it’s such a well done show I was hooked. However in a series that takes place almost exclusively on a mysterious island I thought it was strange that my first episode took place off the island.
Well, to be fair, you could watch that series in any order and it would play about the same.(You could probably shuffle scenes amongst the episodes and not change the story flow too much)
Yeah, there’s a bunch of possible orders for The Prisoner, all with pros and cons. The Wikipedia page even lists Zach Handlen’s preferred order from his Classic Reviews along with the Production Order, Aired Order, etc:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Prisoner_episodes#Episode_list
Btw Big Finish Audio Productiins have used the licence for the Prisoner to produce audio plays
I was lucky to start with Schizoid Man in the 80s when CBS was showing it late Friday nights. Then the next one I saw was Living in Harmony and started wondering why they replaced the show with a Western.
…but what about the last episode that explains everything?/s
I went to an anime con decided to watch a screening of the first ep of some show called “Monogatari,” and loved the way it just dropped the viewer into the world and characters with only the barest minimum of background and exposition. Anyway, it turns out it was the eleventh episode.I still need to watch the series, but the damn thing has changed its name more that Aqua Team Hunger Force and I don’t like having to use Wikipedia to navigate Crunchyroll.There are also several shonen series that I missed tens-of-episodes-size chunks of without noticing.
Probably Star Trek TNG.Summer vacation, parents at work, and no cable, meant that I quickly developed a routine TV schedule, and a few reruns of TNG were usually the mid-day highlight Voyager, however, *cringes.* It turns out that the first episode I saw is widely considered to be the worst one [the one where Paris evolves into a salamander] and I always had a bad taste in my mouth that permanently colored the series.
I don’t know…any Neelix episode is probably worse than the salamader episode. But boy was that one horrible.
I don’t mind the Salamander episode. It’s just too dumb to hate. Kes Nelix episodes are the worst. The episode where Kes comes back is easily a low point for all Star Trek series.
With Buffy, I watched the pilot, and then skipped to Inca Mummy Girl, and caught up on the stuff in between later on.I came in to ER in mid S6, watched until S11, and caught up on the rest when the DVD boxset came out back in 2011 or so.The first few seasons of Friends I watched all over the place, which made keeping up with the relationships complicated.
I didn’t think about the fact that I definitely watched Friends out of order. I’m not even sure when I started watching it because I’ve seen so many of those episodes so many times.
Yeah, I’m not even sure if I’ve seen every episode. I didn’t start watching regularly until S5; there could be some in S3-4 I’ve never caught in repeats.
House. There was a while when it seemed a dozen different channels showed marathons (USA, Cloo, even local channel 13 in Los Angeles). Even though at this time, new episodes were still running on Fox, I didn’t really watch those. I know I didn’t watch it in order and I know there are probably whole seasons I’ve missed completely.
It’s not on Hulu or Netflix so I can’t stream it that way.
House is interesting because you never know if you’re going to get a pure bottle episode or one that tried to advance whatever arc that season has going. They’re all watchable independently, though. One of the basic cable channels has been running it a lot recently so I’m once again hooked.
I found a few “Top 10 House Episode” blog entries. They got me excited to revisit the show and I hit mostly winners.
Yeah, I’ve never seen most of S1. Weirdly, the first episode I saw was Three Stories, which is great, but completely different to every other episode in style.
I’m pretty certain that’s the first episode I watched too and it was an excellent introduction to the series. I watched as much as I could after that, but probably didn’t see the earlier episodes until I bought the DVD box sets. I really have fond memories of House, at least until it started to go off the rails. I’d really have been satisfied if they ended it when they institutionalized him after all those hallucinations.
I tried to watch the early episodes later on, when it was 3-4 seasons in, but I just couldn’t get into them. I might try again some day.
I remember going back and seeing on the first episodes, where he helps some high school lacrosse player. It was clear that some executive at Fox thought House couldn’t just be abrasive, so they tacked on some sad reflective scene (House standing on the sideline of a lacrosse field, cradling his cane like a stick and looking sad and angry) with treacly music over it. Painful.Thankfully, they dropped that quick. 3 stories was when they clearly understood what they wanted to do.
House is on Amazon.House was so bad at serialization (with the exception of the new staff* arc) that it’s better just to skip past the premieres, finales, and the final season all together. Ever wonder what House in a mental hospital would be like? What happens if House is under investigation for prescription fraud from an evil cop guy? How about his relationship with Cutty? What if Wilson was mad at him? House came out in an era where serialization was a buzz word but TV writers and execs didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. I mean good TV dramas are serialized by the nature of characterization not by forcing bullshit plot onto a show that was designed to be procedural. History would reflect a lot more positively on the show if it stuck to its procedural roots. Though I don’t think it would have been as popular during its run. A victim of the times. Though Hugh Laurie was great.
Speaking of Hugh Laurie, I started Blackadder with Season 2, which was a good decision. Season One has its moments, but Edmund is funnier when he’s smarter. Season 3 is my favorite, as it is Edmund at his most devious and Hugh Laurie is a riot as the Thickie Prince the Pinhead of Wales. I saw Season 2 first, then 3, then 1 and I saved 4 for last (glad I did, as the ending was as poignant as I had heard).
It’s on Amazon Prime—I got it for the free shipping, now enjoying the media.And House does not age well. As someone who was in at the beginning, the slow boil towards his unnecessarily offensive behavior that is the hallmark of later years is painful in retrospect. Worse, it is really self-conscious in its trying to shock. You can imagine the writing room being really proud of themselves for each remark about Cuddy. Also, the directors always have the less important actors and patients mugging shocked expressions all of the time (Amber, while an intern, was the worst). So bad.Yet, watch three episodes and you’re back in. I just wasted a Saturday recently and have no regrets.
Yea this was the first to come to mind for me as well. I generally don’t like doctor, lawyer or cop shows so I never even considered it when it first came out. Then as it hit syndication i caught an episode here and there and really liked it. Eventually I went back and watched it all in order.
I think I came into Madmen around season three. My SO was already watching it and I caught glimpses and kinda thought it was boring, but when I actually sat down to watch it was pretty interesting, to me.
FireflyNot on purpose however. Just Fox deciding to run the episodes out of order
Firefly, but that was Fox’s fault.
I suppose this applies to anyone who watched Firefly when it originally aired. I didn’t, and watched it in the correct order on DVD borrowed from the local library.I did technically start watching The X-Files out-of-order, but it was still in the first season. I started with the Jersey Devil episode, which I thought had some beautifully shot sequences, but was generally unimpressive (British Columbia looks nothing like the Pine Barrens. And Atlantic City is on an island). I was curious enough that I watched again, caught the truly excellent “Eve”. and was hooked for several seasons at least.I did drift away from it a few seasons before the end of its initial run, having become frustrated by the core mythology episodes’ tendency to “self-erase” — they’d work up to an apparent climax and then negate everything they’d revealed because, hey, we’re still getting renewed, and we have to sustain some sort of mystery. There might be ways for that to feel otherworldly and compelling, but with The X-Files it just made things feel arbitrary and meaningless.
Fortunately, Firefly wasn’t exactly a serial where order mattered. Though they could have started with the pilot.
Counterpoint: I saw Serenity first >_<
I had a coworker who cited Serenity as one of her favorite movies and had no idea that Firefly existed.
As did I.
Starting with the pilot was the only thing that mattered chronologically, and what did they do? They made it the second episode. What?
It wouldn’t have mattered. I watched it in the correct order and was still very much, “Huh? THIS is what my fellow nerds were losing their shit over?”FIGHT ME, BROWNCOATS!
I’ve watched it all the way through(including the movie) twice, and still think it’s a slightly above-average show.
It’s kind of the American version of Blake’s 7 – they do the same thing in that the planet-spanning government is neither made up of Space Nazis like in Star Wars, nor a utopian wise regime like in Star Trek, but something in between — not obviously malevolent with leaders cackling evilly but one willing to commit occasional atrocities to hold onto power and willing to squash dissidents where possible.
Far worse than that. The pilot was the last episode aired, not counting the three leftovers that they didn’t show until the following summer.
I thought the Ben Stone character on “Law & Order” was awful, I definitely wouldn’t have kept watching if I had seen it from the start.My main entry on this is “Star Trek: The Next Generation” – a friend got me hooked on the series around season 3, which was good, season 1 is barely watchable, even as a fan (I do of course, but it’s hard)
Chalk me up for Buffy, too. I wasn’t interested, but then when Angel started it for some reason did seem interesting, so I started watching it, and then after a couple of episodes there was a Buffy crossover, so I figured, well, maybe I should watch that, too. And I did, and it was great, and because this was the halcyon days of 2000 I videotaped syndicated episodes that aired in the afternoon, starting with season 1, and managed to catch up within a couple of months. We have all the DVD seasons now but we’ve never gotten around to going back and watching through them all again.
As a show that’s loosely serialized at best, this may not be relevant, but I had only seen a few extant episodes of The Simpsons when I arrived at college in 1996, and over my freshmen year, I came to know pretty much the whole canon by watching two or three syndicated episodes each night after dinner. They didn’t appear to be syndicated in equal frequency, either; I must have seen the one with Sideshow Bob at the airshow a dozen times, but I can only remember seeing the one with Lisa finding romance at college once before the DVDs came out years later.
A local UHF station had a habit of programming two different syndication packages back-to-back. That’s how I watched Friends and Newsradio— each night might be an ep from Season 4 followed by an ep from Season 2.
I hate when they do that.
As a diehard Vmars fan I’m only know realizing the dislike for S3. I honestly didn’t think it was that terrible and from what I read it was disjointed due to the fact from the switch from UPN to CW. You got 2 big solid mysteries split over 1 season. As for shows, I started Castle like this. And JAG.
Freaks and Geeks for me and later, Mad Men.
I watched Angel horribly out of order—seasons 3-1-4-2-5.Space was airing them in sequence, so I started with 3, then binged 1 by the time they caught up to 4, then binged 2 in time for 5. It was really not the ideal way to watch it, and seasons 3 & 4 were particularly confusing. Still loved it, though!
Babylon 5. I watched the pilot and the first couple, but it looked too cheesy. Then later I had housemates who watched and really got into it in the third season and eventually saw all the early episodes in syndication. ST:TNG – I watched a few first and second season episodes and it was so bad, I never made it a point to watch. then during the fourth season or so, my housemate and his GF watched it regularly and I saw that it was good and eventually saw all the earlier episodes in syndication. X-Files I got into during it’s second season.
Any time I see that red stripe on ST:TNG uniforms, I change the channel. I just can’t get over how bad they are.
This reminds me that I’ve still never watched the first season of Parks and Recreation. I think I did see the finale, thought “well, that was ok, I guess,” and then picked it up sometime during the second season once everyone started saying it had gotten really good (which it had). I know I did go back and fill in the first part of Season 2 that I’d missed, but never filled in the first.
I still haven’t seen the first season of Daredevil, having started the Marvel Netflix verse with Jessica Jones. I’ve also only seen the first two episodes and five minutes of Daredevil season 3.
You aren’t missing anything. Season One was very mean spirited, and the main joke seemed to be “isn’t Leslie Knope STUPID for caring about her job?? Yuk yuk!”
I recommended Parks and Rec to a friend, forgetting how different and inferior the first season is to the rest of the run. She did not like it. Regrettably, I also recommended this friend watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer – forgetting that series had the same problem. She no longer listens to my television recommendations.
In season one they were clearly trying to establish Leslie Knope as being more or less equivalent to Michael Scott – the annoying boss whose employees secretly hate them – but it didn’t really work as the reason Leslie was supposed to be annoying was that she cared too much about her job so it felt bad to root against her.
Yeah, you can absolutely see the pitch as “the Office, but with Tracy Fleck from Election as the boss!” And it does not work.
Not to be a contrarian, because I see the points people are making as valid criticisms, but I liked Parks and Recreation from the beginning. I think it ended up being a much more feel-good show, and I ended up appreciating it on that level, too. The comparison to Tracy Fleck is apt, but it absolutely did work for me. I have a high tolerance for people who are overly earnest, though, even with the resulting fallout that entails. Weirdly, I also really liked April’s ambivalence, which seems contradictory, but Leslie was always someone who was one defeat too many away from saying fuck it, at least for a time. I think that was pretty much April’s appeal, actually. She cared a great deal but was terrified to reveal it.
The first season it seemed like the source of comedy was supposed to be Leslie’s failures. Like, “Ha ha, look at her trying to DO something! It’s so funny that she cares!” Which tended to fall flat. They shifted for the second season, but the whole Parks & Rec world didn’t really come into focus until the Harvest Festival arc. It took Leslie Knope going BIG and succeeding through sheer force of will that made both the show and the town of Pawnee really click.
I usually describe it as Season 1 Leslie is Michael Scott, Season 3 Leslie is the person Michael Scott always thought he was.
The first season is kinda iffy. The characters are still being sketched out. Seasons 2&3 were the best. The last season was not great.
I loved the final season wholeheartedly, but to each their own.
Yep, started watching season 2 and have never seen S1.
I’ve tried to watch Season 1 a few times and it just doesn’t stick shit actually I started when Adam Scott showed up so that’s like 44 episodes I haven’t seen
Don’t. The first season is pretty weak. The did a really good job of re-tooling for the second season.
Started Buffy with Triangle (season 5 episode 11) and watched the rest in whatever order I could see them on TV. I saw all of the show except season 3 before I saw any of Season 3.Also started original Charmed with Enter the Demon (season 4 episode 4) and took ages to see the episode where Prue died because of out of order TV showings. Startling to begin a show with an episode that has mourning a recently deceased main character as a major theme. Also I knew nothing at that time of the Doherty-Milano bust-up so was perplexed by Prue never being on screen in a Paige episode that was based around flashbacks.
There was a period way back before streaming where I was unemployed for a stretch. I never got into Buffy during the original run, but TBS would air two two hour blocks of Buffy, one at 5am, the other around midday, both at wildly different sections of the show. I had my VCR set to record both, so I’d watch two Season 2 episodes then two Season 6 episodes. It was a weird way to experience the show.
I started watching The Wire while season 4 was airing, then went back to binge the preceding seasons before season 5 started. I could add that I didn’t watch The Simpsons* or Seinfeld from the beginning and still haven’t seen episodes like Mr. Plow or the original Seinfeld pilot, but those are purely episodic sitcoms and were still in their prime when I started watching.
*I only saw Simpsons Roasting Over an Open Fire when I visited my parents just months ago for Christmas
I’m still in the middle of season 3 of The Wire. I don’t think I’ve ever taken this long to do anything in my life. Except die, maybe.
I’m in the same place
Mine was Supernatural. I started at season 9. Binged watched the first 8 seasons that following summer.
Pretty much anything that was in reruns in the 70’s and 80’s – old B&W shows, your A-Teams and Knight Riders, that sort of thing.The first one with a continuing story line was probably Star Blazers, where I caught the Comet Empire season first and then watched the trip to Iscandar second when it came around again in the syndication package. Same with Robotech. I came in during the Invid invasion and then continued on with the Macross season when it rolled around again.
I started in on season three of Parks & Rec. After watching the first two seasons on Netflix, I stand by that decision.
Bullwinkle and Rocky.
Does it count if the network was responsible for putting it out of order? The weird, wonderful series American Gothic featured Gary Cole, young Sarah Paulson, and the kid from Tokyo Drift, and was pretty fantastic. But the network made the baffling decision of airing season 2 out of order. So you got things lime a character getting pregnant before she had sex with a dude. It was a bizarre decision
TNG and DS9 are easy answers, but I’d have to say Farscape. First episode I remember watching a muppet with explosive urine, then when I caught it later there were 2 different crews on different ships from episode to episode, but somehow the human guy was on both.Filled in the blanks with reruns and DVDs, and ended up watching the last season as it aired. Still one of my favorites.
I definitely have fond memories of watching The Simpsons when it aired three(!) times a day on Fox growing up. By the time I was old enough to watch the show regularly, it had already fallen from its best years, but on syndication it was great, and often very different episode to episode. There’s no “true” Simpsons. Seasons 1, 2, 3, 7 and 10 are all vastly different takes on the show’s pieces. Watching it out of order, you can really just feel the massive place the show occupies in pop culture.
LOST. I started watching the second to last season when it was airing and watched through to the finale without having seen the first seasons. It was definitely confusing. I’ve since gone back and watched them, but it really wasn’t super necessary except for the first season
I couldn’t remember the show, but I remembered watching the second season of a show then going back and catching the first. And I knew if I kept scrolling I would come across the answer. It was LOST.
My first episode of Farscape: Crackers Don’t Matter.Put a bit of a damper on my enjoyment of the series, but I really missed out. It’s a great series.
YESSSSS. THISSSSSS.Only no dampener because my first ever Farscape episode was “Revenging Angel.” I instantly fell in love, even when I had no clue what was going on (and with that show … that was often).
“I had no clue what was going on”In universe this is known as the Crichton Effect.
One of my all-time favorite shows, and one I came to in fits and starts. It had one of the best balances between season arcs and standalone episodes I’ve seen, something I wish more shows would emulate. It also managed to allow characters to be fundamentally changed by their experiences. When I binge-watch (which is at least once a year) I’m always struck by how Crichton’s sanity was permanently damaged by his time in the Aurora chair towards the end of the first season.
This isn’t personally my answer, but considering Fox aired the episodes of Firefly out of order that one works by default, for any of you that watched it when it debuted.
Yes, there are better hills to die on. But I’m still bitter.
Yeah, but many more people probably watched on DVD than watched on Fox.
Yeah, I’m sure that’s the case. The DVD sales were the main reason why Serenity happened, after all. Still, when you look at reasons why the show was canceled, that one is pretty prominent. “Would that this desk were a time desk…”
So says every Browncoat. I watched it “in order” on borrowed DVD and was thoroughly unimpressed. Which isn’t to say it’s bad or without charms (there is much to like) but it is WILDLY overrated by its frothing fans.
Yeah, I considered including “in my estimate” in my comment, considering it’s not the only reason why Firefly was canceled. But airing them out of order certainly didn’t do Firefly any favors.
That’s fair. I’m a little knee-jerk about Browncoats owing to some unfortunate experiences with real zealots. There are fans and there are fucking lunatics with no critical analysis skills…
I understand! Crazy fans ruin fandoms. I’m still a huge fan of Firefly but I won’t begrudge someone not enjoying it.
Oh yeh, both ‘Happy Endings’ and ‘Powerless’ were aired badly out of order too. The networks wanted to air their ‘best’ episodes during sweeps week and to hell with the story arc.
The Good Wife. My mom loved it and watched it religiously and kept saying it was so good but myself being a young idiot I couldn’t imagine my mother had good taste in TV Shows. As such I watched one episode as it aired around Season Four I think it was an was like “That is actually REALLY good”, I then got sicks and caught reruns of it on The W Network (W stands for woman) when it wasn’t airing Hallmark films. Eventually it came to Netflix and I binged it all and watched it end. Great series too.Funny enough of the modern series on this list I actually watched all them as they aired. I liked Parks and Rec even in the so so first season, Buffy I was day one (still remember watching the living puppet episode live), even The X-Files I was day one with despite being five years old when Season One aired.
I loved The Good Wife and was lucky enough to watch from the beginning. I want to see the spin off but won’t go for All Access.
For me it was The West Wing. I stumbled on it sometime in Season 4, and they had reruns on some cable show so I was watching in fits and starts from there until I broke down and bought the DVDs and binged until I was caught up.
The Expanse. I tried the pilot and really didn’t like it. The sets were all so dark and cramped and ugly, and I hated everything to do with detective Miller. My brother kept raving about the show, so I got back in at the end of Season 2 and got hooked. I could even stand Miller in small doses once he left Ceres.
I don’t know if you knew it, but there’s really a lot of Dcotor Who. And the way German TV aired or didn’t air it was a freaking mess for years. Decades, really, even before the reboot.
I think everyone gets a pass on Doctor Who.
Doctor Who, the classic series. I started watching towards the end of Tom Baker’s run (my first episode was Meglos, Part 3) but between the weekly airings I worked my way through my uncle’s collection of VHS tapes recorded during various PBS marathons. This meant a lot of jumping around during Tom Baker’s era (mostly his adventures with Sarah Jane and Leela) with a handful of Jon Pertwee stories mixed in (Terror of the Autons freaked me out). To this day, I believe out of order is the best way to fall in love with Classic Who.
Same here, though I started pretty close to the beginning of his run. I had to of been about 3 or so. The Deadly Assassin is the earliest episode I can remember, but I know it’s not the first episode I watched because I remember being familiar with the character. Baker episodes ran on Saturdays on our PBS station. On Sundays they’d sometimes run an older episode with Hartnell. It was quite confusing because the whole concept of regeneration had never come up in any of the episodes I watched until Davidson took over.
The first I recall was something in the Key to Time run. I think the one with the giant squid.
It helps that they released all the episodes by story rather than season on VHS and DVD, so one month you’d get Tom Baker, then Sylvester McCoy, then Jon Pertwee and so on, with maybe a Troughton or Hartnell scattered in where available.I started watching it in the 1990s after the TV Movie and that really was a fun way to discover it.
For me I started with Tennant’s second season. After that season was complete, I started with Eccleston’s doctor and worked my way to the present.
I watched the Eccleston season on SciFi because I had the hots for Billie Piper, but then for season 2 I think it moved to BBC America, which I didn’t have. It wasn’t until season 5, with Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, that I was convinced to pick it back up. Though I still couldn’t actually watch the channel, for some reason Comcast let me watch the episodes on demand. Then when I finally got the channel, I managed to catch up with Tennant’s seasons.
Having been clued into Doctor Who by fellow SF buffs back in 1983, I started by watching the current episode on my local PBS station, “Arc of Infinity” — episode 3. I was plunged in the middle of an ongoing story featuring a bunch of mysterious people and aliens, based on a 10-year-old story that had yet to be shown in the US. Basically, I had no chance of figuring out what was happening. But I never stopped watching.
there’s so many missing episodes from the first era that I think out-of-order is the only way it’s possible to watch Classic Who, lol
Same thing for me – I watched the classic series entirely out of order (albeit story-by-story), but then again, as others have pointed out, it’s pretty much impossible not to given how many missing episodes there are. I also started watching the new show with season 5 and then went back and watched 1-4, but since season 5 was kind of a soft reboot anyway (like the new season), I don’t really think of it as “out of order” the same way.
I’d pick Parks & Rec as well. I only started watching it when it popped up on FXX toward the end of its run. Now, it’s so tonally jarring when I’m lazing away on the couch with a Parks marathon on tv and the show loops from the end of series and starts over on S1E1 where every character is shitty and the joke is supposed to be “we hate Leslie because she cares about doing a good job.” So I’m so glad I got to Parks later because the first season is dreadful and I would never have watched past the pilot.
I’ll have it on in the morning when I’m getting ready for work. Sometimes even in later seasons I want to smack Leslie for being so obnoxious. And just circumventing everything because she thinks she’s right. And Andy is too stupid to be alive. That schtick got old, real fast. My favorite episodes are with the Tammys. Also, The Fight is fantastic.
This is easy, the Godfather of this is easily Law and Order but for me, The Sopranos.
The Wire. Started at Season 3 and then worked back
Firefly. Stupid Fox gave me no choice.
Two shows I started watching in season 3- Parks and Rec and Star Trek The Next Generation… and then I went back and watched the first two seasons and realized I started at basically the right time.
Another Game of Thrones convert; I did start to watch the first episode when it was broadcast but tuned out very quickly, thinking it looked a bit silly. When it started to gain some momentum, I started watching “10 Best Game of Thrones scenes” or “So and So’s Best Scenes”, then when they had sufficiently intrigued me, watched it in order and caught up. Often 2 or 3 episodes a day. I realise the spoilerific YouTube watching may make me a bad person in some of your eyes…
Maybe my favorite TV series of all time, I watched completely out of order. Season 5 of The Shield is maybe one of my favorite seasons of television ever, so of course I got hooked after like two episodes. A friend of mine was catching me up as we watched the beginning (ish?) of that season. I was 100% invested in those characters by the season finale (and OH WHAT A FINALE!). I watched season 6 live, then caught up on season 4, 1, 2, and 3 just before season 7 aired.
So much crazy talent came out of that writers room!
Also Kurt Sutter!
The only episode of The Shield I’ve ever seen is the series finale.
1990s SyFy or SciFi channel or whatever it was called back then.Started Dark Shadows somewhere in the middle of the run, finished up and then started back at the beginning.
Oh man. I have *tried* DS from episode 1 and… Oof. I’m still committed but that show is just… it’s so many f’ing episodes….
Yeah — that’s like saying you’ve seen all episodes of a soap opera — which despite the vampires, basically what DS is.
I also made the mistake of reading an interesting article about how DS was live so you can see some of the set wobbliness or actors fucking up lines or whatnot and I couldn’t NOT see it after that. Like every early episode has some goofy shit happen like that. It’s charming but a little hard to take in a marathon.
Big Finish Audio Productions have used the licence for Dark Shadows to produce audio plays some with the original surviving cast memberz & characters & also others with all-new characters in Collinsport that occasionally run into the shows characters
I watched the first episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia when it aired, didn’t like it, then twelve years passed until a friend suggested I give it another go, watched three episodes of season 12 and liked it a lot, went back to season 3 (due to said friend’s advice), watched and fell in love with the show and binged the series up until season 9, then went back to seasons 1 and 2, then on to ten, eleven and twelve, and thirteen was the first time I watched the whole thing as it was broadcast. Which I know is needlessly complicated but I still enjoyed it an enormous amount.
Wait, It’s Always Sunny has been on the air for TWELVE YEARS?!
13 now.
No. Always Sunny has been on the air for fourteen years (or will have been, once this year’s season drops).
It’s been renewed for a 14th season which will make it tied for the longest running (season-wise) American comedy series!
I have a recent one! I remember when Lucifer first debuted, and after hearing the premise I thought “Geez that sounds stupid as hell,” pun unintended, and didn’t bother watching it. Then I kept seeing the reviews pop up on AV Club, and eventually decided to give it a try in the 3rd season. Loved it immediately, in all its campy glory. I recently went back and watched the first two seasons on Netflix, and really enjoyed the fleetness of those as compared to the rather bloated 3rd season, even if I did enjoy it when I watched it the first time.
X-Files and all the Star Treks.
X-Files! Thank you! I only liked the Monster of the Week stand-alone episodes because the alien metaplot stuff never really appealed to me, but I loved folklore and mythology from an early age.I was trying hard to think of a show that I’ve ever watched out of order, because I’m usually a stickler for continuity even when it doesn’t matter. The shows I cared about watching as a kid were pretty few, but I watched them with a tenacity that I only got away with because I wasn’t a kid who my mother had cause to worry about watching too much TV. By the time I was an older teenager, there were shows on DVD through Netflix/Blockbuster Online.
I had always been interested in X-Files, but I thought it would be too scary so I didn’t watch it. Then I went with a friend to see the movie in 1998 and it was over. I loved the movie so much I had to start watching the show the following season then went back and watched the reruns of the earlier seasons as they aired late nights. This was back in the day so there was no Netflix or other streaming yet, and I didn’t bother with the DVDs because going to Blockbuster was a PITA. lolI agree that the MOTW episodes were clearly superior. I don’t even watch the mythology episodes on rerun these days.
Every show in my top ten I’ve watched out of order. I caught a Sopranos episode as a teenager midway through season 3. I ended up buying HBO just to catch up and watched it out of order as they aired reruns throughout the week. First episode of Deadwood I saw was the Swearigen feeds his guy to the pigs instead of his what’s his name’s guy because Swearigen is smart. It was a standalone episode and I learned a lot more about the characters than I would have had I started from the top. Could only get The Wire Season 2 DVDs from the library. By all accounts the worst or second worst season. Still one of my favorite seasons of television. The death of the blue collar dream. I’ve never seen season one of Game of Thrones (not that it’s the best show or anything) but Season 2 was a fine starting point. Tyrion is the best character.
Watching original recipe Law & Order in bite-sized pieces on random channels really set me up for disappointment when A&E began airing season one. I could not stand him and was just anxious for him to transfer or retire or die so Logan could have a different partner. I remember some episode where a dude who’s involved with BDSM gets murdered, and Greevey’s all, “He’s not going to the same heaven as you and me!”; plus he was sympathetic to abortion clinic bombers… man, fuck Greevey.
It’s funny then that Logan becomes the more unsympathetic one later. I was watching season three for the first time recently and was getting really annoyed with Logan, and wanted to shout at my TV, “Listen to Cerreta damn it!” Though I think overall they did a good job of making him balanced, and I’m sure part of it was annoyance at the general values of the 90s.
Doctor Who. There were 2 PBS stations in the States and one public television channel in Ontario airing it as a kid. Each station had a different story running each week (often with different Doctors). Typically you’d get something like part 2 of a late-era Tom Baker show on Monday from one channel, part 4 of a Jon Pertwee story on Thursday from another and then the third channel would air part 3 of an early-era Tom Baker story on Saturday. My friends and I would try to keep track of what was happening when and try, if we could, to figure out the overall timeline/history of this character and show. Failing that, as we invariably did, we’d read the Target novelizations from the local school and/or public library.This was, of course, all pre-internet.Did I mention we had to walk 3 miles, uphill, barefoot in the snow (IN JULY!) to watch it?
Babylon 5, which I didn’t see til it came to TNT. First, Babylon 5: In the Beginning movie, then Season 5 one night a week with the other seasons one episode each weekday afternoon. Not sure it didn’t make it more interesting that way.
I’m lucky to have watched B5 from the beginning… and some would say a bit of a masochist to have stayed with it, all alone in the night. The Comet network took it from the top recently, and man, that first season was even rougher sledding in every way than I remembered. Glad I stuck with it, though — before long it reached the top ranks of TV science fiction.
The first season was … ugh. Then again, I also hated Captain Sinclair, so I don’t know how much of my feelings were ‘this is meh’ and ‘I’m sick of looking at that guy’. I do know the only reason I stuck around Season 2 was they brought in Bruce Boxleitner. And then things started to gel and the Shadows showed up and Delenn grew hair and a spine and it was marvelous.
Yeah, I remember watching a couple episodes of the first season and going “well, this seems like it is pitched to me, a high school sci fi fan, and *I* don’t like it”. A couple years later my college friends were way into it and I picked it up again when the Mollari/G’kar frenemyship was really getting into gear and got hooked.And then I quit 2 episodes into season 5 because it was like “what are you doing? you *clearly* just had the series finale”.
Breaking Bad. Mrs. Razor was adamant it wasn’t a show she’d watch, but when Season 3 started I tuned in because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It’s a testament to the writers — and what turned out to be one of the all-time great seasons of any series ever — that within two or three episodes our immersion was seamless and complete. We watched Seasons 1-2 in time for the Season 4 premiere. To this day, I regret nothing.
“Breaking Bad” is one of the more rewarding series I’ve watched, but I personally would have found it hard to pick up in medias res. When turning someone on to it, as my wife and have done several times, we recommend that they start with the pilot (if you like that, you’ll probably end up bingeing the whole thing) and watch them in order.
I’d make similar contents about “The Shield,” which arguably started TV’s outpouring of antihero protagonists in situations of fractal moral ambiguity, and which some rainy winter I’m going to re-watch from the get-go.
The pattern here is that there are two broad classes of shows, especially dramas: episodic vs. arc. “Law and Order,” mentioned by one of the authors of this article, is a good example of an episodic drama. There are running themes and long-term trends and a few multi-parters and occasional resurfacing old friends or foes, but you can pretty much watch any episode at any time. “Breaking Bad” would be at or near the opposite extreme: an example of a structurally complex show that, in the long shadow of “Hill Street Blues,” has multiple, interlocking long-term arcs.
Even if I can figure it out, I usually prefer not to spoil my surprise by watching ahead.
Okay. Thank you for explaining the difference between procedural and serial dramas?I read this blog as asking for readers to share their experiences with series, not asking for new ways to approach their narratives, which I certainly wouldn’t recommend for Breaking Bad, specifically, but generally it kind of seems like a fun idea because, fuck it, YOLO, good writing is good writing is good writing. But you prefer spoiler-free living, so have fun with those pilots.
[Spoiler alert for those who have not watched Breaking Bad] It is good writing. I just think I’d be a bit lost on that particular show (there are other arc-based shows that I could figure out more easily) coming in cold in the middle, in terms of what’s going on and character motivations. Other people are more agile and versatile in this respect.
In particular, , the high-sympathy initial characterization of Walter, followed by the long slow reveal of the hidden monster, while Jesse, who starts out heavily encoded for “loser,” is just as gradually revealed as having redeeming qualities and perhaps some chance, makes for one of the great morality plays of television history. Though one could figure all that out by starting in the middle, I’m glad I saw it unfold in the order intended.
Babylon 5, DS9I was about 11 or 12 and just starting to really get into Star Trek. I loved the TOS movies as a kid and TNG was never really exciting enough for a young me. I had found the later seasons of DS9 and those were right up my alley so I did my best to catch up on it after the fact. Then my lovely, artsy aunt whom I never knew watched sci fi, suggested I watch B5 when it was moving to TNT (in the US) for season 4. So I caught In The Beginning when it aired and was HOOKED! Caught up with the rest of it syndicated on TNT and watched season 5 as it aired. SupernaturalI was living with a buddy of mine and who insisted we catch up because Season 5 (at the time the final season!) was premiering a few months later and he caught the Pilot and loved it. It was the first series I binged (DVDs!!!) without watching it air on TV first.
The X-Files. Was horrifically sick one Thanksgiving and there was a marathon on some cable channel (maybe TNT?? no idea) and I watched the whole day, probably at least 9 episodes. I just checked and this was when season 6 was airing. So I think I started watching live but I definitely went and brought box sets of the first seasons and watched all of those until I was caught up.
I also did Buffy out of order. TNT would run an episode of Buffy followed by Ally McBeal (or maybe the other way?) in the morning and I was working a graveyard shift job at the time. I would come home, watch Buffy and Ally, then off to bed. I ended up buying the series box set for both.
I started The Office with The Injury, which I think was still Season 1. I happened to have it on, Stanley tells Michael his foot wrapped in bubble wrap looks like Mailboxes, Etc. I was hooked. I had to go back and catch up the earlier episodes in reruns. I quit watching Season 7 and then went back and watched on Netflix. Now I watch it all the time, the only season I have a hard time with is 8, with Robert Canada. I thought Season 9 got back to what made me love it. The episode with Bob Odenkirk is wonderful, as is Dwight & Angela’s bachelor/bachelorette parties. When Meredith’s son shows up as the stripper, I lost it. And it was the same actor they used as a child in “Take Your Daughter To Work”. There was one episode where everyone listed something no one was allowed to make fun of. Meredith’s was “slept with a terrorist”.
Community. The promos for Season 1 made it seem like the most generic, forgettable sitcom concept ever. It was pure luck that I happened to tune in for this:
I was hooked immediately, and it’s still my favorite episode of the entire series.
Two anime and one live-action.The anime were Slayers and Neon Genesis Evangelion. I bought random VHS tapes of both back when I first started getting into anime. For Slayers, I got the first few episodes after the voice actor switch, a few episodes in the middle of Next, and near the end of Try. For Eva, it was the middle of the series (where they had the blackout) and the final episodes. I ended up getting the DVD boxsets later on and both are in my Top 10 favorite anime.Live-action it was Stargate SG-1. The show had aired syndicated on weekends on my local UPN station, but I never watched it with any regularity. When I got to college, my roommate was obsessed with the show, so I watched it with him near the end of Season 7. After that, I caught the reruns on Sci-Fi and then tuned in for the Season 8 premiere, as well as Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica.
A friend of mine started watching LOST on Netflix, but for some reason the episode list for each season loaded out of order, so he watched it that way. The plotlines obviously made no sense, but since he already knew the show’s reputation as being, well, not straighforward, he thought that was just a part of the mystery.I think he made it like halfway through the third season before we figured it out for him.
does the “Emmanuelle” series count?
Scrubs. I watched it in high school when it was syndicated on Comedy Central, even though it was still airing new episodes as well on whatever channel it was on. Comedy Central showed like a 2 hour block of episodes right around the time I’d get home from school, generally in order, but I only ever got to watch the entire block maybe once a week. I think they also jumped around seasons, so I was never sure the exact timeline of the show, even though I loved the hell out of it until I watched all the way through on Netflix years later.
I didn’t start watching Star Trek: Voyager until its third or fourth season, and watched the shows out of order. Deep Space Nine had debuted two years before Voyager, and had so disgusted me that it turned me off of Star Trek in general.
But when I finally gave Voyager a chance, I felt redeemed by it because it had the kind of characterisations that I craved from The Next Generation. It also had the best acting in any Star Trek series; there is no actor in Voyager’s cast who is less than brilliant.
Even though Voyager has more than its share of clunker episodes, when it was good it was magnificient. Its standout two-part episode “Equinox” is by far the best thing that Star Trek ever produced; and that episode remains one of the greatest examples of drama that I have ever seen. While I know that The Next Generation maintained a higher standard more consistently, Voyager has become my favourite of the Star Trek series.
I watched Voyager from the start, and it had its ups and downs, but like you, I liked it much more than Deep Space Nine. That’s never been the consensus at the AV Club (DS9 gets the most love), but my ranking has always been TNG, Voyager, and DS9. My wife and I rewatched all 3 recently, and only Voyager went up in my estimation. It’s better than its reputation.When Voyager is bad, it’s really bad, but that’s true of all 3 shows. I know many people prefer DS9’s longer story arcs to Voyager’s self-contained “let’s discover a race descended from the dinosaurs in the Delta quadrant and never really talk about that again” stories, but I grew up on the original Star Trek, so that never bothered me. It’s a dated sort of storytelling, but so are silent movies and radio dramas, and I still like those too.
I watched Voyager with my mom, and she taught me the concept of deus ex machina through it (though I doubt she’d call it that). One episode she observed something like “I enjoy the premise, but I hate how the resolution of every episode comes in the last 5 minutes and is kind of random.” My 11 year old mind was blown. It’s also why I don’t really enjoy Voyager as an adult–the gaps are too obvious.
My ranking: 1. DS9 2. Voyager 3. TNG 4. TOS Everything else I don’t consider cannon. Including TNG movies, Enterprise and whatever the fuck they’re doing now.
I must say that I lament the shift to serialisation. This trend emerged during the run of Enterprise; and it made an already convoluted story even more dense. And when Star Trek: Discovery came on, that it would be serialised was just taken for granted. But an effect of that approach is to discourage new viewers who are not willing to binge-watch starting from the first episode.Voyager’s traditional episodic nature allows for the episodes to be watched in any order, which is of course true as well of The Next Generation and the Original Series.
Still, Voyager did have a few arcs that ran for a handful of episodes; and it occasionally made reference in dialogue to events of past episodes. To me it struck the right balance. And I am pleased to see The Orville taking the same approach.Finally, I agree with what you said about Voyager holding up. Watching marathons of it in BBC America, I am struck by how well it has aged. This is no doubt down mainly to the great acting performances. But it also has to do with the look of the show. Voyager is the most beautiful of all the Trek series and movies. The ship looks comfortable; and the uniforms had reached perfection.Anyway, it is very nice to encounter someone else who appreciates this very underrated show.
I absolutely agree on the beauty of the show: the ship is fantastic, and I think the interior sets still look great today. And the opening credit sequence is my favorite of the Star Trek shows. We rewatched it on Netflix, where they let you skip the opening credits, but we never did. I wanted to hear that theme, and see the ship’s shadow passing over those planetary rings, every time.
“there is no actor in Voyager’s cast who is less than brilliant.”Are we, umm, watching the same Neelix? That character/actor made the show nearly unwatchable for me all by himself. I would say that on the whole, Voyager probably has the worst acting of any Trek, with only Picardo and Janeway really standing out, with the rest being anywhere from blandly acceptable to actively annoying and terrible.
The character of Neelix was quite annoying at times, especially regarding Kes. But his non-Starfleet enthusiasm was intended to grate on the other characters.Anyway, that is distinct from the portrayal by Ethan Phillips. The actor did what he was asked to do, and did it extremely well.Also, the character’s interactions with Tuvok were priceless. (The episode in which the two are merged by the transporter is one of the weakest conceptually; but it is saved by guest star Tom Wright, who gave a performance that was equal to the high standard of the show.)Voyager eventually made good use if Neelix’s experience with the various races’ customs, and he became a valued part of the crew.But I cannot fathom your dismissal of the rest of the cast. You rightfully single out Kate Mulgrew and Robert Picardo for praise. But do not overlook the remarkable work of Roxann Dawson. The episode “Faces”, in which B’Elanna is split into her Klingon and human halves, was a tour de force.Tim Russ had the job of portraying a full-blooded Vulcan; Tuvok had none of the emotional baggage of the half-human Spock. As head of security, he did not fully trust Chakotay for a long time, a fact that Chakotay knew full well. Russ gave Tuvok a steely demeanour, and allowed the character to become the quintessential Vulcan.Robert Beltran brought a quiet dignity to Chakotay. This character, as the leader of the Maqui, was key to getting that group of former anti-Starfleet rebels (which included B’Elanna) to accept integration into Janeway’s crew and a Starfleet identity, in the service of the goal of getting home. Beltran portrayed a man carrying that burden beautifully.And Beltran had several outstanding moments. There was “Timeless”, in which Chakotay and Geordi engage in the most polite chase scene ever, one where each character demonstrates his great respect for the other.There’s also “Nemesis”. Here Chakotay finds himself in a war on an alien planet, and we see him transform from an outsider who wants nothing to do with the conflict to an engaged participant. (I will not mention the twist ending, so as not to give spoilers to anyone who has yet to see the episode.)And most praiseworthy of all was Beltran’s performance in the series-defining episode “Equinox”, in which Chakotay is forced to confront a twisted Janeway who has gone off the rails and has resorted to war crimes.Robert Duncan McNeill played the irreverent Tom Paris with abundant charm. This character was the only one who did not share the group’s enthusiasm for getting “home”. For Tom, home was Voyager, the only place where he had found acceptance and respect and love. On Earth, Tom was just a prisoner whose own father didn’t love him.The jaded Paris at first could not take the inexperienced Harry Kim seriously; but this relationship eventually grew close and emotional, thanks to whole-hearted performances by McNeill and Garrett Wang. Wang brought a youthful earnestness to the role. And this actor has become Voyager’s most ardent champion, exhibiting a sensitivity, a thoughtfulness, and a passion on the level of the now-beloved (and formerly reviled) Will Wheaton.Finally, Jeri Ryan was added to the cast for the worst reason: to show off her body. Yet she took the role of Seven of Nine and gave it depth and power. Despite the fact that the show continued to dress Ryan improperly in a tight catsuit rather than in more appropriate garb, Seven became a very strong character. So good was Ryan’s acting that viewers never suspected the tension between her and Mulgrew, who resented the introduction into the show of eye candy, and who took this resentment out on her fellow actor. Yet the on-screen relationship between Janeway and Seven was always warm and nurturing.There is no cast in any other iteration of Star Trek that came close to the talent and the level of execution of the cast of Voyager.
Rick and Morty for me. I watched the first episode, wasn’t really feelin’ it. A year later, I was in a bar for a roller derby afterparty and “Pickle Rick” happened to be on the TVs. I caught a few moments of it here and there and thought, “That’s about the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever seen.”After I came home and sobered up, I gave the show another shot. Now I’m a fan.
The Kroll Show. I watched nearly the entire second season, the third season started, and after that I binged the first season.
It’s not that the first season is necessary watching, but watching the Oh Hello guys doing their schtick for an extra season is totally worth it.
Mine is fairly easy, I started watching Cheers during season 6 which was largely a reboot year after Shelly long left. Actually her leaving was one of the reasons I started since her character annoyed the f out of me
Doctor Who, I caught an episode on Sci-Fi way back when and saw 10 and Rose and loved it. Tennant is my Doctor.
Definitely Buffy for me. It just sounded far too stupid for words, but I kept hearing good things and finally started watching around season 3. I’m glad I did it this way…I went back and watched season 1, and it’s really not all that good. A few strong episodes, but the show really doesn’t get to the next level until season 2.
“Wiseguy” I started with the midseason finale in S1: the “Sonny Steelgrave Arc” as I suppose it’s called. And to be honest, jumping in right then, it wasn’t too hard to figure out what was going on – Undercover Cop in the last act of taking down a Mob Family. Still it was riveting. Then they moved Vinnie as far away from the mob fiasco as they could – in story – and their choice was an uber-rich wasp drug-dealing yacht-living brother/sister combo: “The Mel Profitt Arc.” Joan Severance was a dish and who was this sassy guy playing Mel? He was good! I watched all I could in late night syndication, riding it through actor Ken Wahl’s paralysis – which they tried to write into the show! Johnathon Banks was great, then only known as the hit man from Beverly Hills Cop. Kevin Spacey a couple years before Usual Suspects – on CBS – coming out of nowhere was like, “Man, this guy is going to get famous someday.” And … yup.I was able to watch the beginning of Season One when it cycled around in syndication. Here’s one Amazon should buy, or CBS All Access should resurrect – and hire coverbands to play the radio pop music in the show, re-edit, and clear up the goddamn music rights that have kept the show out of rotation for 25 fucking years.
Ah that first season of Newhart, when apparently it was believed that comedy gold could be mined from the premise of Bob Newhart being an innkeeper, with cute “B” storylines supplied from his pseudo-wacky, horndog, pathological liar neighbor. It’s amazing how much you can get wrong on a show and still somehow lay a foundation that a truly great show could rise above. Had this show premiered today instead of on still-dominant network TV in 1982, with an established star attached to it, I suspect we would have never had the chance to find out.Early Law and Order also a great pick for this list, for the opposite reason. Going on 30 years since its debut, it’s hard to remember what a refreshing, almost radical show it was upon its premiere. No trite story lines about the main characters’ personal lives, as is so common with today’s crime procedurals (particularly the CBS variety). No elite squads of airbrushed, blow-dried supermodel cops using science fiction technology to catch comic book super villains (looking at you again, CBS). Just a simple, somewhat gritty, almost pseudo-documentary style procedural about the criminal justice system, featuring realistic crimes and characters, portrayed by some of the best character actors the NYC stage and screen community had to offer.
Jack McCoy’s self-righteous histrionics, the revolving door of ADA’s who looked like they’d graduated from the Ford Modeling Agency rather than law school, and the endless parade of “ripped from the headlines” plots would all come later. Though IMO, Law & Order didn’t really hit its stride until the arrival of Jerry Orbach as Lennie Briscoe, and it never really recovered from his departure.
I goddamn love old episodes of Law & Order. No bullshit, just sarcastic New York cops.
The Good Place, actually. I had been aware of it since before it started airing, and was interested, but had missed the premiere and a number of episodes in the beginning of the first season, but hadn’t worried about it. I don’t even remember specifically what the first episode I caught was, but I was 100% hooked after that. Was finally able to watch the ones I missed after the first season showed up on Netflix, and didn’t actually know until then that you weren’t supposed to know Jason was Jason at first.
LOL, what…? Like, all of them…? What sane person treats a TV show like some sort of twenty-stage esoteric rite?
I started the wire midway through season 1 (although season 2 was already out). The first scene I watched was McNulty at the FBI office arguing for support vs. Stringer and Avon but were shot down due to no terrorism connection. The next scene was Omar, who I figured was the big-bad of the show and who McNulty had been talking about.
L&O: Original Recipe, Homicide, Farscape.I am slowly working my way over Season 1 and half of 2 of Person of Interest. Basically, I ignored it during Season 1 (CBS, vigilante drama, eh), started hearing great reviews from this site, but when I tried watching an ep, my husband had a bout of Grey’s Anatomy Disorder (where a professional tries to watch a show that includes lots of their professional knowledge and the suspension of disbelief is snapped so hard that they are convulsed in laughter and/or rage) so I shut it off. A few weeks later, I Tivo’d a late S2 ep and watched it on the downlow. Adored it.Of course, part of the problem is that there is an increasing amount of complexity and science fictional aspects that are blended into the show over time, so early Season 1 seems simple and bland – like a vigilante drama on CBS.A show I need to go back and watch, if not from the beginning, than definitely S2 E1 – Legends of Tomorrow. I want to see how it evolved into the beautiful wacky show we know and love today.
Let me offer a few tangential question: What show did/do you love at the beginning, but when you go back it is painful and you’d never have watched it now?Answer: House, M.D.
Cheers. Started watching after Rebecca had come aboard. It actually took me a while to get into the Diane seasons. Diane is kind of off-putting, but the chemistry between her and Sam was so great that it made it easier to get into things. As did Coach. He was fantastic.
Parks and Recreation as well. I tuned in at the third season, definitely the best one of the bunch.
For me it was Northern Exposure, which I only became aware of in its 4th season (but one of our local channels started showing reruns so I caught up after I started watching season 4-5.
Farscape
“Gomer Pyle USMC.” Unfortunately, I saw him get killed in Vietnam first.
Two, both animated, oddly enough.I watched
all of Reboot Season 4 when it premiered on Cartoon Network, having caught maybe half an ep during the original run, and then
went and binged the first three seasons at a friend’s house later.
It
was pretty surreal watching the early stuff and going, ‘Oh hey, that’s foreshadowing that won’t pay off for another three
seasons/seven years/two more networks’.
C’mon nostalgia fairy, where’s my S5 already?The other would be Berserk. At A-Kon 2000 I wandered into a random theater
and caught about two and a half episodes of it. The episodes were from
the middle of the series, so I had no idea who anyone was or what was
happening… And I didn’t care.
Between the animation, character designs, absolutely jaw-dropping violence, I was instantly hooked.
And I wasn’t the only one: What we were watching included the previews of the next episode. The guy running the AV equipment stopped without showing the last one, and the crowd booed.
Loudly. To the point where he had to put the DVD back in, scene select
back to the preview, and play it. That’s how badly that audience wanted
even a tiny glimpse of what was going to happen next.
I started The Wire with its last season.Makes me sick motherfucker, how far we done fell.
I watched a LOT of Game of Thrones clips through Youtube before I went back and watched Season 6 and 7. Same with Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and because that was on for twenty years I forget that some hosts and team captains never interacted like I thought.But rewatching out of order is how I watch most of my shows now. I think shows like Stargate SG1 and Star Trek Voyager benefit from this because I can just go watch the one where O’Neill and Teal’c do Groundhog Day or the one where the Doctor realises someone’s been tampering with his memory about a missing crewman.
Chuck, series 2; Chuck Versus the Dream Job.Two of the biggest mysteries of the first series gets wrapped up in one episode and it happened to be the first one I watched.
I remember when I first saw Babylon 5, back when it was in its initial airing in syndication, while struggling with insomnia in high school. I wasn’t able to keep up with every episode, but I saw most of season 2 (and I think some of 3) without having seen any of what came before.Later I began watching it from the beginning with my roommate, and it was really hard not giving away stuff I already knew about G’Kar and Londo, and why I seemed more sympathetic to the Narn than I probably should have been based on the season 1 episodes. (He knew I’d seen what was to come, but I hadn’t spoiled anything except the Sinclair-Sheridan changeover.)
The one and only show i first watched out of order was Lost and believe it or not it really worked.
CSI: New York. The episodic nature of the series made it easier to get into.
Believe it or not, Twin Peaks, which made it even more nonsensical and confusing, which I guess adds to the charm.Order didn’t matter back then in the 80s, 90s and many other series I watched in a completely out of order fashion.
I used to like to watch Battlestar Galactica on Netflix (through my XBox) and Netflix made the egregious error of switching the episode that reveals the Final Five (Crossroads [Part 2]) with the one before it (Crossroads [Part 1]).
You know that had to piss off whoever watched the series for the first time on Netflix.**The problem only happened when viewing Netflix through the XBox. If you used a Playstation or other connection app (Roku, etc.), the episode order was correct.
I randomly started Breaking Bad during season 3 when I sat down while someone else was watching it.
I remember first discovering M*A*S*H when it aired on FX way back when, and there was no rhyme or reason to the ordering of the episodes, going from a Henry Blake to a Col. Potter, Frank Burns to Major Winchester and back again. It didn’t disrupt the viewing, except for the occasion when they would throw in a couple of VERY early episodes and I’d scratch my head wondering “Who the hell is Spearchucker Jones?”
This one’s pretty dark, but I caught an episode that featured one of the most controversial subjects: a school shooting. It’s as disturbing as you would imagine, and I wondered what show would dare do such a thing? Turns out it was the Season 6 premiere of Sons of Anarchy. I kept watching a few more episodes after that because this gritty series was weirdly pretty good, and unlike a lot of other stuff on tv. I then decided to pause the season, to go back, and watch it all from the beginning over the next few weeks. The biker culture, gang politics and almost Shakespearean family drama really hooked me, along with the crazy chases and action set pieces. I loved SoA, but the irony coming back to finish Season 6- the season that was good enough to get me started in the first place- is how much weaker that season was compared to its previous years.
I started watching Community near the end of season 2, so the first episode I ever saw was the fake clip show. When I went back to watch season 1 and the first half of 2, I was waiting for all these episodes from the clip show to happen…and slowly realized as I got closer and closer to where I’d started that none of them existed. Which made rewatching that episode one million times better. Best way to watch the show.
This article is a nice demonstration of just how far the AV Club has fallen since the great Kinjafication. Really? An entire article about people who didn’t start watching a show during season 1? Who gives a fuck. I keep coming back to this site hoping for a semblance of its former self, but it’s just so much mediocrity.
I came into X-files some time in season 2. I didn’t know that Gillian Anderson had got herself knocked up by a stage hand and was heavily pregnant. On first seeing her my initial thought was “How pleasantly innovative, they hired a heavy-set woman to play the second lead!”
Aside from shows where I saw bits and pieces of reruns first (like 30 Rock, Scrubs, and The Office), the one that comes to mind is The West Wing. I saw the first season on DVD, and then watched a bunch of episodes that were either in reruns or first running (I came into it around when season 5 was on), and then caught up on earlier seasons when they came out on DVD. It’s one of my favorite shows, but I definitely started on it out of order.
(FWIW, there are a bunch of others that I saw out of order as reruns, like The Muppet Show or other things when I was a kid, but since the order there is kind of irrelevant, I think they don’t really count.)
Battlestar Galactica. I started watching during season 2 because I was delivering pizzas over the summer during break from college. I’d get home around 1 AM and SciFi channel would air the reruns. Fell in love and bought the initial movie and first season over like 2 days of watching it and doing nothing else.
I have watched the 50th and 51st seasons of “Documentary Now!” and keep meaning to go back and watch the first 49 seasons.
There are still first season 30 rock eps i havent seen.
I didn’t start with the Buffyverse until the 2nd Season of Angel. My friends at my fraternity would occasionally watch Buffy, but I had no interest. I think the first episode I saw was either the second-season ending Pylea arc or maybe the one where Wesley impersonates Angel, but eventually I got hooked. It was before streaming and before you could download everything off the web, so I watched most of the rest of the series before I went back and watched the beginning (maybe it was the daily reruns on TNT?) and then Buffy, and Firefly, and Dollhouse…
A Different World. The syndicated reruns started after season 5, I believe, and were scheduled opposite local news on our FOX station. Being 11 at the time, I had no interest in local news, and we were not a cable family. Growing up in the Heart of Dixie to liberal parents, despite being a white kid, a ton of my neighbors and friends were black, and the allure of “adult college life” coupled with a response to / coninuation of the living history of the civil rights struggle that was all around me really connected to me, and those after-junior-high viewings became a staple. I caught a lot of the final season as it aired (or on a single VHS that I taped all the TV I wanted to watch in a single week on) and eventually stitched together the timeline. I didn’t see my first Denise Huxtable / Marisa Tomei episode until well into having mentally established Dwayne and Whitley as the leads, so it was a bit of a shock. I’m still not sure I’ve seen every episode, but I am fairly certain that Dwayne Wayne is the reason I taught English in Japan for 3 years in my early 20s.Grown-ish, the spiritual successor to A Different World, is a bit of a guilty pleasure now and how I keep up with what “the kids are into these days.”
Mine was the Sopranos. Didn’t start watching until season 3 or so. Now I’ve watched it a number of times.The same thing for House.Oh and the first season of Newhart is freaking awesome. Crazy neighbour Kirk is an under appreciated character (who was eventually replaced by Larry, Daryl and Daryl).
Same on Veronica Mars! That’s happened to me fairly often, where I start watching when day 1 viewers are going, “Man, it’s really gone downhill,” so that season’s not too bad to me. Other examples off the top of my head: Heroes (season 2) and Community (season 3. This one’s debatable and it’s still a great season of television, but I’ve seen people saying season 3 is when it started declining).
So though I’ve seen every episode of its 20-season runDanette, I’m going to need more Law and Order content from you. The SVU partnerships rankings only whetted my appetite. Maybe if the mothership finally finds it way to a streaming service? Why hasn’t that happened, by the way, is staying on syndication only way more lucrative?
Star Trek TOS
I don’t know what is more jarring, being a dedicated viewer of Buffy and having Dawn suddenly introduced, or being a late viewer of Buffy and noticing that Dawn just didn’t exist in the earlier seasons for some reason.
Gods, demons, vampires, witches, ok. Adding a little sister, jarring.
I watched random episodes of Dharma and Greg and then saw the pilot episode. Skip the show but watch the pilot which does a perfect 22 minutes of situation comedy. It is right up there with the episode of Taxi where the Reverend Jim takes his drivers test.
I started watching NYPD Blue in high school with TNT reruns and then picked up the series with Ricky Schroder’s Danny Sorensen arrival. Since then I’ve watched the complete series beginning to end at least 3 times, just having recently finished another round.
Buffy is my answer – I had a baby the year it came on the air, and I lost out on 2 solid years of pop culture from ‘97-’99. I started watching in Season 4 and was horrified that I had missed out on something so perfect for me.
When I watched BTVS, I recorded the episode while I was watching it, and then immediately watched it again. Every episode.