As the Mild Wife and I have found ourselves with more time in the house on our hands, one of the simplest ways to solve this problem has been to watch some Netflix together. To a certain extent, this has already been part of our lives, since I will pick code words to describe movies to the Mild Wife. Still, with the advent of more time on our hands, we have found ourselves picking a long-running show and watching an episode or two every day.
Now, it sometimes takes a little bit of time to settle on a show that we like, since we prefer to watch it for weeks and months at a time. So, not only does it have to grab our attention and hold it for the majority of a season, it has to have some staying power. Plenty of shows are entertaining for a little while and then sort of trail off, so it takes a bit of futzing sometimes to settle on a show.
That means that we value staying power and good storylines over how recent the show is, so it's not uncommon for us to pick "new to us" shows for our nightly viewing. For example, we recently finished "The West Wing." That show is most definitely not new, but it had a pretty good run for seven seasons and it was a good drama for most of its run. Sure, there were some episodes or story arcs that we didn't like that much, but, all in all, we liked it.
Most recently, we have switched over to "Madam Secretary." We've enjoyed the first couple of seasons, so it's gotten our nod of approval through forty-something episodes. However, that also means that we've watched enough of it to notice an interesting trend: that show has a really long opening scene. For most shows, you will watch a couple of minutes worth of the plot before you see the usual opening sequence/credits. I would imagine that the idea is to hook you with just a little bit of information, just enough to whet your appetite.
With this show, however, we tend to see an act or so before that opening sequence plays. I think I was the first to comment on it, but after I said something, we started roughly tracking the amount of time before that opening played. For most episodes, that comes at about the twelve to fifteen minute mark. Considering that most of these shows have about forty minutes of content (with commercials, it'd be a full hour), that is a really long time to wait before showing that opening sequence. That's about a third of the show!
Of course, now it's become a game. We chuckled about the whole thing when we first noticed, but now we track the length of that opening scene/act. It's not uncommon for the Mild Wife to ask, "how long was that?" as soon as we see the opening credits. Fortunately for us, the show seems to be heading in a good direction, so we will get plenty of practice with that question.
Still, even if we were to stop watching tomorrow, I feel like we've gotten double the entertainment from this. That's not bad for a way to keep ourselves amused.
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