Update

Yes, spring has come and gone. Yes this is a late update. Yes, if I'm lucky, two people will read this.

But hey, I don't care.

Alright, so my TV addiction has reached new heights. After having watched the ENTIRE series' run of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (still awesome, btw), I bought the entire boxset and watched most of the commentaries and featurettes as well as a few favourite episodes. And I realised something - there's a reason why I'm nearly always in the mood for a good TV show, and actually rarely in the move for a movie. I love telly. I love the played-out storylines, the long term character development, and TV's ability to truly grab a viewer and hold on.

It's a different feeling to watching a movie. Movies can grab you, but it's rarely a long-term thing. Maybe that's something you can judge a person by - moviegoers are used to falling fast in love with something two hours long... sometimes not even that. A movie requires you to spend a concentrated period of time watching a preplanned series of events that are all pointed to one ending. A really, truly amazing movie covers a few major themes and touches on some minor ones, but generally can only have one basic thrust. Love stories, coming of age, saving-the-world stories... in the end, they need to be categorised.

Television's different though. A good TV show, like Doctor Who, or Buffy, or Glee, can showcase a load of themes - love, revenge, pain, loss, comedy, high-school drama, saving the world, confidence issues, how it feels to be an outsider... a good TV show can cover some or all of these and more. It can make you laugh one episode or cry the next. A movie can only ever be monster-of-the-week, a TV show can have over-arcing story lines, and the Baddies can win once in a while without a comeback heroic victory five minutes later.

TV can draw it out, it can convince you something is truly scary with a good build up, it imitates life better than any movie. We can see Rose and the Doctor's relationship gradually growing up, it can be subtle and slow. A movie has two hours to fit in an entire story - a TV show has a series, up to 24 episodes to tell you a story and engage you with a setting and a set of characters, so it hits harder when they fall and feels better when they succeed.

I mean, movies are great. The end of a good, sad movie can make you cry, but it can rarely make you laugh, cry and jump for joy over and over again. TV can do that.

It can be subtle, build things up, and fit in a whole range of themes and plot lines. It can subvert genres and make a huge mark on pop culture. Movies, when they're good, can do this too, I'll grant you. But I like the slow build of really good TV, when it progresses from the set-the-scene series opener to the dark peril and ultimate explosion of the finale. Characters and settings become real to the viewer, and we are tempted to imagine the hundreds of paths not taken, much as we do in life.

So there, analysis over, just thought I'd defend my TV mania. I like to be sucked into a different world, and true immersion is rarely instantaneous. I like books that take a while to read and TV shows that take a few days, at least, to watch. It gives you time to reflect, and to guess what's coming.

That's why I think that, on balance, there are more rabid TV fandoms than there are rabid movie fandoms.

And movies just don't have that. So, TV worlds I'm currently immersed in:

Doctor Who (of course)
Glee
BtVS
Gilmore Girls
Gossip Girl (very, very sad but true)
How I Met Your Mother (hilarious, and Barney/Robyn is AWESOME)
Friends (cause I've seen every episode... yeah)
Ouran High School Host Club (Anime, yeah!)

To name but a few. I should take media studies, and get graded for this kind of analysis.