MyNetworkTV is the television network operated on many CW Network stations. If you didn't already know, the CW is the network that was formed when The WB and UPN networks merged and began airing in September of this year. I don't watch any CW shows, but my wife and I do watch a quite a few current TV series.
We've been watching ABC's Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives since they began airing a couple years ago. We picked up Lost at the end of season two, but we started from the first episode and caught up before watching any new episodes. We've also been watching the Sci Fi shows Eureka and Stargate Atlantis (she doesn't watch that one, just me) and most recently we started watching the Fox show Prison Break (like Lost, we started at the beginning and caught up to the most recent airing episodes). We occasionally watch the Fox show House, but we don't follow it regularly and wouldn't know if an episode is new or a re-run unless we've already seen it before. No NBC or CBS shows really interest us, even though those two networks have been at the top of the ratings list for evening shows the past few weeks.
The thing about all of the shows we watch regularly is that you have to start watching from the beginning, otherwise they don't make much sense. That's the way Lost was to me BEFORE I started watching it from the beginning. I recall when the first season of Lost was airing, and I tried to watch an episode of it, but it was the fourth or fifth episode already. It didn't make much sense, since I didn't see if form the beginning and understand the context of where they were and how they got there. I didn't understand the ongoing inter-episode stories and it didn't seem like an appealing show to me at all. I wrote Lost off as a fad and assumed it wouldn't last past its first season. Near the end of the second season, I overheard co-workers speculating about the storyline and decided to give the series another chance. I got all the episodes form the beginning up to the last one that aired and in two weekend days and one weekday evening, we watched them all back to back from the beginning to the present, something like 40 episodes.
Now I think Lost is a great show and it was an awesome experience watching the series from the beginning without the waiting from one week to the next and through commercial breaks. I know these shows are the network's bread and butter, so to speak, but I really think these shows lose a lot of punch by airing in the conventional TV-style process. I wonder if there is a viable business model around creating and releasing these type of series a whole season at a time and available on-demand (for download, or on digital cable) so they can be watched back to back. I would even settle for them airing a new episode every weekday, like some MyNetworkTV shows are doing, instead of one a week. I understand that the show aired in this way would not be able to fill the full season, but my concern isn't about network scheduling practices, but about the quality of the experience when watching a series. I've been considering not watching the shows until the current season completes, then watching them back-to-back over a weekend's time, but it's hard to ignore the shows when you know when they're playing, so I still turn on the TV and watch them each week.
What shows do you watch regularly and what are your thoughts on how shows air and how you would like to see the process change in the future?
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