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This is as good a time as any to share my non-completist's manifesto. Rule #1: Unless it's your job to watch all of something, it's not your job to watch all of something.
Rule #2: If you get to the point where the finale has to pay off hard to make the time you spent on the show worth the trouble, stop watching it and wait until it ends. Then get a general sense of the finale and decide whether to finish the show.
2a: Yes, you will spoil yourself in the event you go back to it. You will be surprised how much it will not matter, and how much you'll enhance your enjoyment of the show when you aren't sweating whether you're wasting your time.
Rule #3: If a show is uneven, it will almost always be easier as a binge-watch than a week-to-week drip. The boring and misbegotten cage parts of LOST went by in an afternoon when I binged those seasons.
Rule #4: It is fine to stop watching a show. It doesn't mean you liked it and then you turned out to be wrong. You can still love the section that was a story you wanted to hear, even if you stop wanting to hear the rest. People quit book series or movie sequels all the time.
Rule #5: The purpose of entertainment and art is to be pleasurable and/or interesting and/or transporting. You are, statistically, missing almost everything that's being made. There's probably something you'd enjoy more than whatever is frustrating you.
Rule #6: Watching television is not supposed to be a contest to see who can endure more punishment.
Rule #7: Should you reach the end of the show and find the ending unsatisfying, it doesn't mean you wasted your time, necessarily. It may just mean that last set of choices rang false, just as some in the middle perhaps did.
Rule #8: Develop a sense of when shows are doomed by their own scope/ambition, and adjust your expectations. npr.org/2009/12/16/114…
Rule #9: Don't expect clumsy treatment of such things as gender and racial tropes to change very much over multiple seasons. They can! But that's the exception. Choose wisely.
Rule #10: No matter how much they tell you it's one long movie, it's not. It's episodes of television. You can watch as many as you want, shake the show's hand, and move on. /fin
