A two-season k-drama fan told me I was watching shows wrong

I used to skip the first 3 episodes of anything to see if it grabbed me. She said I was missing the setup that makes the payoff work, so I sat through all 16 episodes of Signal from episode 1. Now I give any show a full 4 episodes before I bail. Anyone else have a hard rule about how many episodes you commit to?

3 comments

3 Comments

grace8923d ago

Actually Signal only has 16 episodes total, not 16 per season like you implied.

the_jessica23d ago

Oh great, so I was confidently wrong on the internet for a whole season too long. @grace89 thanks for the save, my bad math brain strikes again.

rubysingh21d ago

Flip that around and think about your own attention span instead of the show's structure. I actually timebox my episodes - if a series can't make me care about a single character within 90 minutes total runtime it's done, because some shows take 3 episodes just to introduce everyone but tell you nothing real about them. That four episode rule works great for kdramas with their tight writing but for a lot of western shows you're basically committing to half the season before you hit the actual story engine.