Giving Up Time
Maybe we were conditioned to “stick-it-out”. As kids, we bought a ticket, entered the movie theater and watched Roy Rogers until he finally shot the bad guys. Because we paid good money for the show, we expected to get our money's worth. Right? But, what if — for whatever reason — we did not really like the movie. Did we get up out of our seat and leave the theater? I don’t ever remember doing such a thing. OK, I’m sure some did and my memory is hazy but it seems that it was not common to leave, back in the 1940s and 1950s when some of us were growing up.
Now, fast-forward to where we are today. We have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, and almost unlimited sources of movies, documentaries, news, music, and whatever. We paid upfront for these services so if we decide to stop watching a particular show, there is often no great benefit to “sticking-it-out”. Personally, I find that my “giving-up-time” is growing shorter and shorter. “Giving-up-time” is the time that we are willing to invest in some unproductive, uninformative or unentertaining activity before we decide to do something else. There is a limit to how many shows we will watch to the end, especially if we find something objectionable in them. Of course, we are sometimes suckered into watching a bad production to the end, just to determine the identification of the murderer or if the guy got the girl. But how much news we can watch, how much comedy we can stand or how much propaganda we can withstand? How many “experts” — whose forecasting ability on the market, politics, weather, or climate have such an outstanding record of failure — can we watch.
One example: We were watching a series about police in Iceland solving murder mysteries. One scene, designed to increase audience excitement, depicted the lawman searching through a scary, dark building with a flashlight to find the hidden bad guy. It became very predictable that the bad guy would sneak up behind the policeman and hit him over the head. So, at one point, when a policeman entered another dark building with a flashlight, I stopped the show and explained to Pat that if the cop was conked on the head, I would stop watching. It was just too predictable. We would give up on this show, even though we would not know how it ended. Pat agreed, but somewhat reluctantly, because her giving-up-time is longer than mine. As expected, the cop was clobbered and I could take it no more. I had reached my “giving up time.”
But predictability is only one reason why I might stop watching a show. As we have access to almost every movie ever made my strategy has been to focus on those rated five-stars. Since there are a limited number of old or new five-star movies, we were soon forced to watch movies of lesser quality. With rare exceptions, I will almost never watch a movie rated with one or two stars by a decent rating agency like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb — and am very skeptical of ratings by Netflix or Amazon Prime. In my humble opinion, they tend to overrate their own shows — much like Amazon rates the books they sell. I assume that books with a high rating sell better than those with a low rating, so there must be a tendency to rate their books somewhat higher than deserved. Also, I seldom ever watch a pre-1950s movie because the sound, photo and acting quality is just too low for my taste.
So, I don’t know if my discrimination against certain shows is due to a shorter attention span as I age, an improved ability to judge those I don’t like more quickly or a short-fuse for boredom.
Oh well!
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