Commitment

Long-term relationships are hard. You have to give your heart away without knowing how things will end. Even if they end well, at some point along the way, the other party will frustrate you, or let you down, or be just plain Wrong. It’s a lot to go through with no assurance of a payoff.

I’m talking, of course, about my relationship to television.

Though the cost factor means I often wait for DVD or Netflix, I’m usually willing enough to see a movie. At the worst, I’ll only have wasted a couple of hours, and I frequently learn things from bad movies. “That didn’t work” is easy enough, but “Why didn’t that work?” can be a delightful and illuminating puzzle. Most importantly, at the end of a couple of hours, I will know. I will know whether it worked or not; I will know what happened to the characters; I will know what the movie is trying to say.

TV isn’t like that. TV demands trust. TV builds expectations that, as the years go on, become more and more difficult to satisfy. How many perfect finales have you seen (other than Blackadder Goes Forth)? And when a show fails, whether the failure be minor or catastrophic, it hurts more. You know these characters - you’ve lived with them for months or years - so the betrayal can feel very personal.

I’m going through this right now with Once Upon a Time. It has never been my great love, but I had mostly been enjoying it, and Robert Carlyle is worth watching even when what surrounds him is less than ideal. But now, the whole Tamara and Greg subplot leaves me absolutely cold, they made a serious misstep with “Lacey”, and no one - I mean no one - is as stupid as Regina was in “The Evil Queen”. I will slaughter whole villages to find Snow White, then I will kill Snow White, and once she is dead the people will love me. I hereby challenge the writers to find me one actual person to whom that makes actual sense.

Is it possible for the show to recover? Sure. I sat through Season Three of Lost and was ultimately glad I did. It’s also possible, though, that it will not recover. If it doesn’t, I will not be devastated, but I will be disappointed.

And yet...

There’s a new man in my life. His name is Sherlock. It’s taken me two years to find him, and I owe a very belated hat tip to Joseph Susanka of Summa This, Summa That. I held off because I was afraid he would be great, and that his greatness would demand my attention. My trust. Another tiny piece of my heart. The funny thing is, when I finally sat down to watch him, that’s exactly what I wanted him to do. The fear and the desire can’t be separated. So far, they have both been satisfied, and therefore they have both increased. And very soon, I will reach the end of Series Two, glare at Netflix, and shout, “What do you mean I have to wait until September?!?”

Here it is, Mssrs. Moffat, Gatiss, Cumberbatch and Freeman (and all the rest of you that I don’t have space to mention). Here’s a piece of my heart.

The game is on.