*If you want to know the current show, I'm going to keep the title updated (through the help of whatever awesome mod wants to do so) once it's determined.
Well, here we are again, Arlong Park. Good ol' me, and one of my crazy hairbrained schemes. I wrote a lot here, most of it when I was tired, so I hid most of the (poorly written and convoluted) ramblings while trying to focus on the main points. This idea has been a long time in the works, so I hope it can get off the ground. Note: none of this is perfect, and I'm looking to refine how we do this, so, please, input and ideas are wanted!
Unnecessary background info ahoy, if you want to skip it, I won’t blame you!
[hide]After having a lot of fun with The Lost and Arrested Development Rewatches, I started to think about classic, completed (in a sense– for AD) television shows that maybe a lot of people haven’t seen, or that are just so good that people wouldn’t mind watching through them again. Instantly a wealth of shows popped into my mind: Twin Peaks, Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, Buffy, The West Wing, The Wire, Samurai Jack, and so many more. The number of possibilities is really quite, so much so that there’s no real reason to try and justify creating a thread for each one. Thus the idea for an Arlong Park TV Club was born.
I got the idea last summer, and ever since I’ve been trying to refine how it would work. I looked back on The Lost thread to figure out what went wrong there. The most obvious thing was the scheduling. I made it more packed than I should so that it would be finished by the time school started. This naturally resulted in some people not being able to participate due to time limitations. The only big problem was the length of the series. 120 episodes is quite a lot to fit into a 50 day period. So, with Arrested Development I lightened the schedule to 2 episodes per day, or only 40 minutes. Well, as we can all attest, that didn’t exactly work either. Yeah, a lot of people participated, but there wasn’t much discussion, at least not what I would have liked. And the schedule still didn’t quite work, everyone just kind of went at their own pace. So, now I think I’ve finally gotten a system worked out. Here’s how it’ll go: [/hide]
Here’s the new and (hopefully) improved system:
[hide]
Instead of having a set schedule for episodes, we’ll just have a parameter for the series run-through, based on the number of episodes. So, for instance, say we’re doing Firefly, or Freaks and Geeks, or some other short series, instead of saying: “watch one episode a day” it’ll be along the lines of “watch the whole thing by 10 days from now (or whatever time frame is generally agreed upon.)”
The other big issue was the nature of discussions. I tried both times to force daily reviews of every episode, and both times it started well, but tapered off, so here is my (rather fantastic–if I do say so myself) idea: instead of trying for episode based discussion, we’ll go for an idea based discussion. Whomever is leading the series (I’ll get to this in a moment) and others familiar with it will come up with some topics for discussion. These can be very basic reaction ideas, or they can be intricate discussion about plotlines as they’re ongoing. Ideally the ringleader for the show will come up with something controversial that will get fans old and new into having a heavy discussion.
Obviously the biggest issue here is how do you do this without spoilers? This might seem strange, but ideally you would sit out the discussion until you’ve completed a benchmark, which the discussion topics are based around. For a short show like Freaks and Geeks, it would be as soon as you finish the series. For a longer show like Buffy it would be at the end of every season, or every half season. Based on the preference of whoever’s running the show, and what they want discussed.
Now this does not mean that no discussion should be going on. There should probably a couple of basic things geared completely to newcomers, as really this is more for the newbies and the vets.
Obviously, this system might not work, so it can, and will, be refined over time, hopefully with input from all of you. [/hide]
Basics:
- No set schedule, just a general parameter
- Not an episode based discussion, but a topic based one.
- New "showrunner" for every series.
Now, about this showrunner. I obviously haven’t seen every great TV show ever, and there are some I know I’d like that I’ve never seen, thusly I can’t be throwing out ideas for discussion. So, based on whatever show is next on the schedule, someone can volunteer to run the thing. This entails setting up the parameters of the rewatch and creating some topics for discussion. Simple enough, right?
So how do we decide what to watch?
Right off the bat, I want everyone submitting ideas for what they want to watch, or what they want to get other people into. (Ideally whatever it is would be available in legal means, even if that’s not how people choose to watch it.) I’ll gather up all the ideas, write them down, then pull one at random out of a hat. Then I’ll ask for volunteers, and we’ll be off and running.
Three final things to mention.
- For the first show up I'd like to start with something short. Something along the lines of Freaks and Geeks or Firefly or any other short show.
- Stick to shows already completed. I know you all want to get more people into things like Sherlock or Parks and Rec, but nope. By all means recommend them if you think we're watching something similar, and others will like it as well. (Also, I cleverly staggered this thread until 30 Rock was finished, nominate away.)
- No anime. Sorry again, but I've created this with "classic" TV moreso in mind. Not to take anything away from anime. However, if a lot of you overwhelmingly want this rule overturned I will.
I'm creating this whole thing for the same reason I did the Lost and Arrested Development ones, not just for people to rewatch shows they love, but for new people to get into great shows. Thus my plea is, give every show a chance. Try and broaden your horizons.
So, any questions? I have a feeling there'll be many. And get to nominating!
P.S. There is a movie club in the works.
