Waiting for the Suck

I've mentioned it before, but I like to watch some Netflix while I do the dishes. I don't remember when I started the practice, but it's become a routine at this point. It gives me something to focus on while I do chores, and it makes the whole experience more enjoyable. All in all, it seems like a good idea to me.

Now, I know that my screen time is limited. I'm certainly not going to wash dishes for two hours, so I can't watch an entire movie in one go. Heck, half the time, I can't even watch half of a movie in a single session. Ultimately, that drives my viewing preferences, so that I tend to favor episodic shows. Basically, that's how I watch some show or another: one dishwashing session at a time.

Recently, that's been the Star Trek: Enterprise show. I never watched it when it first came out on television, so this is my chance to see the whole series. As with many series, there are some good episodes and some not-so-good episodes. Still, it's a means of entertainment during chores, so I more or less just run with hit. It's not like it's been so terrible that I've wanted to give up on it altogether, though I will readily admit that some of the episodes were hard to get through.

However, during one of the recent bad episodes, I got curious how many seasons the show had lasted. I didn't want to know any spoilers, I just wanted to know if it had a long run after that or not. As it turns out, there were only four seasons of the show, so it wasn't an overwhelming success. From what I understand, ratings were low by the time that it was canceled.

In essence, there were good odds that it was going to suck at some point.

At the time when I looked this up, I wasn't yet on the fourth season (I might have been somewhere in the middle of the second season). So, I had it in the back of my head that the show was going to get terrible at some point, but I didn't know when. That led to an interesting phenomena where I would wait for the penny to drop. If there was something that seemed off, I would wonder if that was the beginning of the end. Was that character arc going to mean that the show veered into Terrible Land? What about that new technology? Was it going to be abused and suspend disbelief? There were lots of interesting moments like that.

Now, I fully recognize that it's possible that the power of suggestion was at play. I may have actually started to veer towards "this sucks" because I had some warning that it might eventually go bad. I can't completely rule this out, though I do think that some of my reasons for disliking certain episodes are pretty solid. Heck, I was thinking that before I discovered that the show was canceled, so I'd like to think it was mostly my original analysis.

In either case, I'm still slogging through the episodes, but I'm still waiting for the show to get bad. It's sort of amusing hearing myself wonder if this is it. I'm at the edge of my seat waiting for terrible television. That's at least worth a giggle, right?