I recently started watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon) with my wife and we did the viewing her way, which is to do about the first three episodes in a row in one sitting. To be honest, I think this is how most people watch TV nowadays. I tend to space episodes out, not more than one in a day -- it's how I best absorb it. But anyways, I was pretty much head over heels hooked by the end of the third episode. Whereas, as you'd guess, there are plenty of shows with which I watch just the pilot and decide promptly at the end of it that, well, it was interesting maybe but definitely not worth another minute.
And I realized something in this Maisel experience. It's not because I felt like I'd dedicated so much time to the show that I had to keep watching. It's not even that I needed to know what'd happen by the end of the season (an extremely reasonable 8 episodes). It's that I felt immersed and comforted by the atmosphere, style, and movement of the Maisel world. I knew what to expect and enjoy, and more so than that, I think the 3 episode immersion had conditioned me to it. The effect of the binge wasn't to hook me with twists, or even increase the magnetic pull of the actors/their characters, but to start thinking like the show. And when you get to that point, it's not work to keep watching anymore. You don't have to decode the world because you've been inoculated on a basic level. Granted, this show is less outwardly challenging to the audience than many dramas. It's incredibly comedic, and the setting is lush, and obviously it's helmed by a veteran showrunner and brilliant writer (Amy Sherman-Palladino) -- and she's not the Pizzolato type, she's not trying to reinvent the wheel and laugh in your face as you catch up. She's executing the perfection of her style of craft, with immense amounts of humor, and yet still real and subtle character drama in every scene. It's really impressive in its own right, which may be why it had the effect on me that I described. But nonetheless, I think I just felt it more strongly than other binge-worthy shows. The rules apply elsewhere. And I think three episodes is more than enough to hook someone on this multi-faceted level -- and that seems to be the norm with which people experience a new, hyped-up show.
