How to Bring Wonder Back To Your Favorite Visual Media
About six or seven years ago I had become so SICK of being excited for visual media only to have it let me down. Be it a TV show, mini-series, movie or what have you I would be excited for a about a month and a half, then finally get to see it and feel… underwhelmed. Through a lot of soul searching I found out the problem. It wasn’t (always) that the piece I was watching was underwhelming or a bad piece of work, it was that I felt as though I had already seen this piece.
To give you a little perspective I saw (at the request of many people who’s opinions I respected) the movie “Meet the Parents.” I was already excited to see this movie having seen the little bits they showed on TV that were rife with comedy. They were really well crafted comedic scenes which started at one point and escalating far out of control. They ran maybe four or five different commercials about the movie with entire scenes from the movie in the ads. By the time I saw the movie I was bored by it because I had seen the funniest moments of the movie nearly a hundred times (it was a very aggressive ad campaign as I remember it). Objectively I watched it and said “Oh that’s funny, but I’ve already laughed at that. I see why this is funny, yes, yes. Other people around me are laughing so why can’t I?”
It was after this that I vowed never to watch previews for anything if I already knew I was going to see it. If I’d never heard of the movie I’d watch the trailer and avoid any other media associated with it, but if it was based on a popular franchise that I wanted to see I left the previews alone or (in extreme cases) closed my eyes and plugged my ears until it was over. It’s not an exact science but it seemed to work. Case in point, I tried this experiment with the Will Smith vehicle based on the Richard Matheson classic “I Am Legend.” The movie received a marginally respectable 70 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes which says it was good but not great. All the same (with the exception of the very end) I was with this movie from beginning to end. I had no idea how they constructed the monsters, I hadn’t seen the best parts of the movie in advance, just the post-apocalyptic Times Square landscape, and I only saw that once. Everything about this movie was new, and fresh and interesting.
Movies aren’t the only visual media which suffers from what I will call the “Please sweet deity of choice, please ensure people will pay attention to this,” hooking device that has grown out of control in media. Reality shows (love ‘em or hate ‘em) have mastered the art of finishing one episode and then telling you exactly why you don’t need to watch next week’s AT ALL. I watch Project Runway with friends and one of the scariest and most tense statements Hiedi Klum makes in the show is not “Auf Wiedersehen,” it’s “Next week on Project Runway.” Don’t tell me what you’re doing next week, I want to show up next week and see people make garments out of lettuce or see them steal the clothes off their competitor’s backs to make a cocktail dress.
What I propose is this: If there is a show you watch regularly be it Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Sleepy Hollow, Vampire Diaries (it’s irrelevant) but have been becoming bored with, try avoiding previews for this coming episode. Don’t look into it at all. Come at the show with the same sense of wonder and newness that you started it with. The problem is that since you already know you want to watch the show, the advertisers are not targeting you with their “PLEASE WATCH ME!” advertisements but you may be getting caught in the crossfire.
