My shrinking attention span: is it okay to...

Viola Davis as the charismatic lead role, Analise Keating in How To Get Away With Murder

I feel bad. I haven’t ever felt comfortable with quitting a book I didn’t enjoy, my optimism hoping it will pick up in the next chapter. With this same idea, is it okay to leave a tv series unfinished as you can’t be bothered to watch until the end?

I have a few series hanging. Initially I enjoyed them but they just droned on relentlessly so I lost interest. First is How to Get Away With Murder on Netflix. Viola Davis is amazing, she kept me interested and hanging in there when the plot became thin and stretched. Powerful, sexy and compelling, I rooted for her until the series felt like it should have come to a natural end but…it kept going on, and on and on.

Recently I started watching an Adam Curtis docuseries called Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (available on BBC iPlayer or Youtube). Adam is a talented documentary maker and I really like the juxtaposition of reoprtage with archive footage and awesome soundtrack. His work is always a multi-sensory experience and well adapted to our shrinking attention spans. However, his documentaries are usually about an hour long whereas this series is several episodes long with so much material covered that it’s difficult to follow the narrative and figure out on where it’s all heading. It’s also not compelling enough to continue on through the episodes and in these perceptive times, I can’t help but roll my eyes so regularly that they ache at the lingering male gaze. Adam Curtis is an expert with editing so to have random, scantily clad women as entertainment which neither helps the narrative nor illustrates what his point of view is only makes me think: it’s not made for me, it’s made for men. In normal times, I wouldn’t let this experience prevent me from watching the entire series but I don’t have the patience for it this time.

One series that I really recommend that I did watch to the end is the latest series of The Crown featuring the story of Diana and Charles. It’s super, really sensitively captures a version of her story and the fashion is wonderful.