A few nights ago, just into the 97th hour of my exhaustive, exhausting quest to watch every existing episode of “24” before the new season starts this weekend (7 p.m. Sunday, KDVR- Channel 31), there was one of those big payoff moments.
It was a sit-up-straight-and- gasp surprise, the kind you wait for in this adrenaline-fueled series about a counterterrorism unit – more unexpected because it happened in the first moments of the fifth season, almost as the credits rolled. Former President David Palmer – pensive, strong, seemingly indestructible – was standing calmly by a window when an assassin’s bullet crashed through and killed him. Whoa.
It would have been even better if I hadn’t known it was coming.
That’s one big problem with watching TV shows on DVD, months or years after the show has actually aired. You risk finding out things you don’t want to know, merely by glancing at a newspaper or stumbling onto a website or chatting with another human being.
But that’s not even the main problem with gorging on 120 hours of one show. The real issue is: Who the heck has time for this sort of thing? Certainly not those of us who have full-time jobs, kids with busy schedules and other such pesky distractions from our TV viewing.
Little did I know what I was getting into a year ago on New Year’s Eve, when two fellow journalist friends – they know who they are – recommended that my significant other and I check out “24.”
We watched that first episode, and an obsession was born. It became an unspoken contract: We were going to watch the whole thing, no matter what – even if we stopped liking it, even if it got boring. Why? Would it be trite to say “because it was there?”
All of which raises the question: Is this good for us, or for anyone? All this available entertainment content, waiting to be devoured? Every week a new series comes out on DVD, dozens and dozens of hours of it.
Obsessive TV-viewing has been around as long as the medium itself, but it’s really only in the past five years that TV shows, as opposed to feature films, have become established in the DVD format.
Now, says Netflix Inc. spokesman Steve Swasey, they’re a huge part of the online DVD rental giant’s business: fully 20 percent of the 7 million DVDs it sends out per week are TV shows.
“The real phenomenon is people renting a whole season or an entire series,” says Swasey. “They’ll have a ‘Lost’ weekend” – pun intended – “watching the whole thing straight through.”
Among the most popular series? “Entourage,” “Lost,” and of course, “24.”
