A few weeks ago I left Post Scriptum behind to embark on a journey of television discovery. The trek was a perilous one; I trudged through the tropical jungles of a certain Lost island, organized a mass Prison Break with misjudged juvies, while working to unravel the Mars-ian mysteries looming over a Neptune-y town in California.
At the end of it all, I stood exhausted, facing my greatest challenge in the electronics section at the local Wal-Mart.
That’s right folks, I traveled every channel–high and low, cable or regular, on demand, or not so much, and nothing left me in as much of a quandary as the big W of multi-faceted department store consumerism.
As I walked through the aisles in the shadow of monumental racks, I stood surrounded by the past, present and potential future of television. TV DVDs; they are here to stay, and I can’t help but feel like they’re taking the life out of my television experience. Now before DVD lovers everywhere unleash disc-throwing hell at me, let me make myself as clear as a certain circular reflective surface.
In recent years DVDs have provided a new market for television; shows of the past have garnered new life through nostalgic box-sets and viewers (not unlike myself) have managed to make even the most chronic of OCD sufferers green-eyed at our TV collecting prowess (Please see re: large stockpile of Whedonverse related DVDs in my room).
TV DVDs provide great opportunity for prematurely cancelled or eternally forgotten shows to restore their could-be greatness. It is in the medium of DVD that viewers can slow-mo the lives of their favourite characters while play, pause or F-and-F the odds and ends of story they may not want to see or hear. The very act of doing so is powerful for any viewer—it is television designed to your needs, at the control of your own sticky fingertips. But before you march in the DVD-pride parade, take into consideration what a viewer loses when the pacing of television is put into inexperienced and ever-wanting hands.
I’m the type of viewer that watches syndicated reruns of my favourite television shows, despite the fact that I have series-sets gathering dust in the deep-shelved recesses of my bedroom. Why? Because it’s just different.
What bugs me about our friend DVD is its incessant need to spill all the secrets and plot twists of our favourite shows in one sitting. I for example, have been catching up on first-season Lost episodes and can’t stop myself from going through disc after disc as if it was made out of chocolate gooey goodness. I can’t help but feel that had I watched the show on-air from the beginning, anticipating weeks of new episodes, imagining weeks in between, I would somehow appreciate the show more for its storytelling efforts and be less of the greedy-grabby Lost-eater I’ve become.
You see, television seems designed for the gaps and pauses, for the multi-month-long cliffhangers that have fans marinating plot developments through and through in their head. The gaps are where fans form connections; communicating on forums, devoting their lives to their own Insidepulses, or creating their own fantasies in their own mind’s eye.
DVD may be a quick-study to the latest trend in TVor a way to get some of the insider information behind a show’s masterful making, but they cannot delegate the order or velocity one should enjoy their television. What it adds up to then, is an equation describing the fast-food of television—instant gratification, leading to an over-filled viewer with little patience for twisty plotlines, willing to make you do the time to earn the payoff. Remember when that dude threatened to sue another greed-gratifying company by the name of McD because he’d become a lazy, overweight citizen with no ability to pace himself between meals? I’m thinking of doing the same to Wal-Mart and all other TV DVD-selling store-operatives.
I may have left Post Scriptum behind, lamenting about the long TV-less winter that lay ahead, but I realize now why I needed it. A gap in television storytelling is as powerful as me doing…This:
What, did you actually expect me to tell you? You’ll have to hold out; you can’t find me on DVD anywhere.
