Category: I Watch Too Much TV

I’ve spent most of July in a fugue and I blame Amazon Prime Video for all of it.

It started out innocuously. I had seen the first episode of the first season of Fleabag and laughed myself sick on the couch, despite not actually being able to hear any of it. I do this sometimes, just lie on the couch following the captions on the screen, mentally giving the characters their voices. When something is especially funny, no sound is needed to appreciate it. And that was Fleabag.

I’d thought nothing of it. It was a random, fly by night quickie, meant to while away half an hour cheating on my Roku by figuring out how our new Android media box works. It doesn’t, by the way. Not really. It’s a shitty, earnest, horribly un-intuitive attempt to support piracy. Everything moves like molasses, there are pop-up ads galore, and I quite simply do not speak its language and probably never will. It’s probably the wrong media box for me or anyone, but I digress.

Late June was where the confluence of events came to a head. The bestie brought up Fleabag again. He couldn’t quite stop quoting from the show and so, simultaneously inundated with Twitter ads for Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, I decided to hit two birds with one stone. I bit the bullet, and got Amazon Prime for a month.

Alice followed the white rabbit and started falling down a tunnel into Wonderland. My descent was closer in spirit to Wile-E Coyote, walking off a cliff and free-falling into a canyon, except it felt like I was never going hit the bottom.

I blazed through the entirety of Fleabag in the course of a weekend. It’s a great show, with outstanding levels of exquisitely placed shade, the humour as black as the grounds left in the office coffeemaker at the end of the day. It deserves all of its eleven Emmy nominations and I would recommend it to anyone casting about for something to watch. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is an insanely talented writer and she’s so good I could almost hate her for it. But I can’t, because I love her work in (and as) Fleabag so much.

And then it was on to Good Omens. What is in the water these Brits drink? How do they come up with these fantastical flights of fancy? I’ve been a longtime Gaiman fan, and as a TV show, Good Omens is the yang to the yin of American Gods. It’s light, it’s funny, it’s sweet, it’s uplifting and it’s witty beyond measure. I hadn’t yet gotten around to reading Good Omens and didn’t know if I was going to like the show, but I was a goner the minute they introduced Sister Mary Loquacious of The Chattering Order of St. Beryl. Sister. Mary. Loquacious. Terry Pratchett has gone on to the great beyond, but Neil Gaiman still breathes and is a national treasure who must be protected at all costs.

That was supposed to have been it. I was supposed to have gone on with my life, maybe having blithely ordered a few things to take advantage of the free two-day shipping all Amazon Prime members get. But no. Oh no. No, no, no. I started to watch Lost. I had survived the mid to late aughts having never seen Lost, and  now my luck had finally run out.

The free-fall continued.

Lost has six seasons. The first three seasons have at least twenty episodes apiece, each clocking in at almost an hour. The last three seasons vary in length from fourteen to eighteen episodes, and the devil of it all is that it is very, very, very hard to stop watching Lost. It is the kind of show that raises more questions than it answers and never really resolves anything. Like a charismatic cult leader, it is maddeningly opaque at times, colourfully inventive in others and always, always, keeps the viewer wanting more.

I wasn’t immune, gamely going along for the ride, feeling the days and weeks slip past alternating between work and Lost and work and Lost and work and Lost until it finally, blessedly, confusingly, ended.  The famous finale, the one that the conclusion of Game of Thrones is most frequently compared to, that divides the fandom to this day. That ending. And all I could think was, it’s over. It was finally over. I had nothing more to give, no energy left to come up with a coherent reaction to the Lost finale, because I was just so glad to have finally hit the canyon floor.

No, no one held a gun to my head and made me do it. Yes, I really only have myself to blame. But oh, the feeling of freedom, the satisfaction I felt terminating my month-long Amazon Prime subscription. I’ve come out on the other side. I don’t want to put myself through that again.