Growing Pains in Art Criticism

Yesterday, I attempted to write up a review of the first season of Netflix's "Daredevil." I say "attempted" because, after two hours, I had only two paragraphs. That's certainly less than anticipated, and it lead me to wonder why it seemed so difficult. I had watched every episode, fully intent on catching every detail and plot point. What was it that kept me from producing a review of resonable length that I felt satisfied with? Eventually, I came to a conclusion: I was attempting to review an entire season as though I was reviewing a movie. The two have totally different formats that just don't lend (at least for me) to similar reviews.

It took me breaking it down on a basic level. A film is, usually, an entire story that is told and concluded within one sitting (clearly this excludes franchise based films). This can run around a maximum of three hours, and is easily consumable. A television series, on the other hand, takes much more time to consume. For Daredevil, that would mean around thirteen hours of material to sort through, and that certainly more difficult than a mere three.

Going further, television is in the business of longform storytelling. Each episode can be seen as a chapter that is also self-contained. For example, something like "Game of Thrones", may function as a minature film during each episode, telling an entire story but functioning within the larger picture of a season. Reviewing such a thing would take my looking at the first episode and the parts within, then doing the same thing with the second but putting it in context with the first. This would go on and on until the end of the season.

Now, I've heard a variety of suggestions of how to "correctly" watch television. Some have suggested waiting until the end of a season to decide how I feel about it. That means watching up to twenty hours of material just to decide something that could be decided in the initial three. Even more, that would mean that one mindlessly consumed nearly a day's worth of material before beginning to have any sort of critical thought on it. That seems too close to "turn off your brain" media consumption for me to even begin to take that seriously (I mean, honestly, why on Earth would someone think that "turning off your brain" is an appropriate way to consume media...that kind of thinking is literally the fuel for the majority of reality television, something I will go on record as saying is garbage). Perhaps, it relates more to the reality of the majority of people that consume media not really understanding the language it uses.

At any rate, my official stance is to view a show a few episodes at a time, then review those chunks. I concidered doing one episode at a time, but I don't really have the time to review each episode in the detail I'd like to. Then again, this may change tomorrow, as I'm prone to wildly changing my mind on certain things. I chock this up to my still being a bit green when it comes to this whole "art criticism" businesss. The best thing for me to do is to keep consuming all sorts of media, write a lot, write a lot, and write a lot.