Several years ago, one saturday morning when the kids were gone, my wife and I flipped on the TV to find that some channel (I don’t even remember which one) was doing a Witchblade marathon, showing the entire first season in one day. It looked interesting, so we started watching. We watched about the first 3 episodes, went out the store, and came back and watched about the last 4. We really enjoyed it, and watched it throughout the repeast season so that we could get the episodes we missed.
During that day, it was a normal TV show in that there were commercials, and yet since it had all the episodes back to back, the cliff-hangers were immediately gratified. That was really quite pleasant.
As previously mentioned, we watched a lot of Alias this week, and the process had all the enjoyment of the Witchblade experience with one added benefit: no commercials. The excitement would get to a fever pitch, it would fade to black, and fade back in and keep going. That was cool.
The Alias episodes had enough action and interesting stuff that one episode felt like a whole movie, but because there were no commercials, each episode was 40-45 minutes long. That’s perfect for someone who wants to start something at 10pm, yet not stay up until midnight watching it. Since we started at about 9am, we watched 3 discs in one day. 🙂
Another nice thing is that when they leave you hanging you can simply start the next episode. I’m not good with waiting to find out what happened with a cliff-hanger. It bugs me. I’d almost rather not watch and have emotional peace. Which does indeed have something to do with why I don’t watch it on TV.
24 is also out on DVD now, and we’ll probably start watching that at some point in the not-to-distant future.
I know exactly what you mean about missing an episode and being ruined. I use that as a reason to avoid “tempting” TV shows. I know that if I see one episode, I’ll have a lot more trouble overcoming the addiction to see the rest, so the Lord has shown me to just avoid seeing any of them whatsoever. And it’s amazing how little power TV has over one’s life when he operates that way.