A Long Time Ago

I don’t binge tv shows. As much as this day and age means that the moment a show comes on Netflix or Amazon or Hulu I see people on Facebook talking about having watched a whole season by the end of that day. With all these shows appearing, you do just about have to binge them in order to keep up. Because while Stranger Things is released one week, the next might be the Next Star Trek and then the next is another Marvel TV show.

This weekend I got to experience the mad rush that is binge-watching a show. Veronica Mars, my wife’s favorite show of all time, came back to have a fourth season on Hulu. And while she’d taken great pains to clear her weekend schedule for this coming week (when it was supposed to come out), they released it a week early. Which was both a nice surprise and a sudden annoyance as our entire weekend was already packed to the gills.

So what do you do when you have a baseball game, a soccer game, a poker tournament, and a friend’s birthday to go to on the same weekend? You literally fill every spare second with an episode at 1 in the morning on Friday night after the Braves game. You wake up an hour early on Saturday and watch it through bloodshot eyes before the poker tournament. You sneak in 1/2 an episode after the birthday party. Another one Sunday morning before the soccer game.

And so on. It wasn’t so much as binge-watching as it was like racing through a show. There wasn’t any time to savor what we’d seen. And I think that maybe that was mostly due to not really being able to block out a two or three-hour block and do it then. It becomes a whirlwind of making sure you catch everything you can in the viewing. And hope the speed doesn’t cause you to miss something.

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The show though?

It was really good. I was a little surprised at how well things flowed from one scene to the next. Character rhythms and interactions with old characters and brand new ones felt like they made sense. It was an adult version of this character. If the movie, dealing with the ten-year high school reunion could really be seen as the pivot point for the character. She chose to stay in Neptune (her home town) and try to make a go of it there. And now the show picks up some five or six years later. Our main characters are not in high school, they have bills to pay, they have adult issues to deal with, and yet it all feels like the characters we hung out with all those years ago.

While I know that they got to do a movie a few years ago, doing a brand new season made it where you could have the longer-form storytelling that we were used to from the first three seasons. And while this was only 8 episode, that meant that there were no wasted scenes. Plotlines wove between each other, overlapping at times, connecting some characters to others in unexpected ways.

And like any good noir, there were multiple points where I had it all figured out, and then I didn’t have a clue, and then I had it figured out again. And then I was wrong. And then…

You get the picture.

I want to avoid any real specifics on this one right now since I hate when people who’ve watched the show in record time then want to tell you “every cool part”, but then make sure to say “I’m not going to spoil it, but…”. Instead, I’ll say that I hope that it does really well because I need to see what the 5th season might look like.

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John McGuire is the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. The Trade paperback collecting the first 4 issues is finally back from the printers! If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Want to read the first issue for free? Click here! Already read it and eager for more?

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His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow EmpireBeyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

About John McGuire

Writer of comics and novels. In 2006 his first short story "The God That Failed" was published by Terminus Media in their debut comic Evolution Book 1. Since that time he has had stories published in Terminus Media's Evolution Book 2 and Evolution Special, Kenzer and Company's The Knights of the Dinner Table, and Four J Publishing's The Burner #3. Currently he is eagerly awaiting the digital publishing of his first creator-owned comic The Gilded Age #1 to be published online as well as his first novel The Dark That Follows later this year.
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