It was the new version of Doctor Who (and the spinoff Torchwood) that I caught up with last year, watching through Season 6 until I suddenly found myself waiting for new episodes just like every other poor schlub. The transition wasn't particularly jarring, because I still had most of a year to wait for new episodes anyway, and I started grabbing classic episodes on disc.
Most recently I watched through the entirety of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It wasn't until I finished the first season of Buffy that I realized what I'd gotten myself into. The show was originally a mid-season replacement, so I didn't realize that unlike the first season's 12 episodes, seasons 2-6 were each 22 episodes. Plus 5 seasons of Angel. Each episode is 45 minutes.
I'm the kind of person that has a very hard time putting down a book I'm in the middle of. Now factor in that I was suddenly wary of the casual "spoiler" dropping that is entirely kosher for a show that has been off the air for 10 years. This was not going to be an easy process.
Watching an entire series in one (months long) marathon is a very different experience than getting it one episode at a time, at the original pace. In the traditional model, you have more time to digest each episode on its own. Each single episode means more. You're more likely to dwell on things you didn't like, and you have more time to savor the things you did. On the flip side, watching several episodes a day can cause all sorts of events and impressions to start bleeding into each other in your memory. I had to start taking notes so I remembered when specific important events happened relative to each other.
The biggest thing I missed was discussing the show with other fans who were at the exact same point in the story. The last time I had that in any major way was back during the run of Babylon 5. (I still have a prominent link to the Lurker's Guide and its awesome episode summaries on my custom browser homepage.) Discussion of theories and opinions was always half the fun of the thing. At the same time, there would always be some synchronization of those opinions. You might adopt someone else's dislike of a character you didn't particularly care about, just because that person really didn't like them... and insisted on pointing out every tiny reason.
So you end up with the good and the bad of the group dynamic. It's a shared experience and a way to expand your enjoyment of the topic, but there's also some measure of groupthink that develops.
I mention this because I thought the marathon approach had accentuated this difference. Having finally reached the series finales of both shows, I felt safe searching the web for information akin to the Lurker's Guide, to help pick up on things I may have missed or check on my assumptions at which plot points were due more to production process than pure storytelling. This eventually led me to /r/buffy on Reddit.
Within a surprisingly small number of posts I picked up on the General Fandom's collective major Things They Don't Like. Very few of them surprised me much, beyond the initial "huh" moment. To me, the Story I was watching was the entire Series... or maybe one Season at a time. As such, individual things that didn't sit right were small compared to the whole, and didn't chafe me any. To most of these fans, though, specific actions or characters were elevated almost to Jar Jar levels of scorn. To them, these pieces loomed large in their individual experiences, and either though natural process or adopted groupthink, they became a pillar around which everyone could gather and communicate in the universal language of the Internet: ridicule.
Almost universally, I disagreed with the sentiment. In most cases, though, I could at least see the reasoning behind the opinion. I had the big-picture perspective to see how things fit together overall, but not the detail view to be irritated by every perceived flaw, legitimate or otherwise.
Back on the other side, I've been watching the current season of Doctor Who along with the rest of the world. Well, generally the morning AFTER the rest of the world due to broadcast timing and distribution deals, but close enough. I'd started checking on /r/doctorwho/ long ago, but the dynamic was very different than the Buffy subreddit. Since this show is still running, it has a much higher volume of posts, and the vast majority of them are random TARDIS sightings and cosplay pictures or various fanart. Even after the new season started, there were only one or two threads that appeared specific to each new show, and those were quickly swept away by the usual content.
So it took me a lot longer to start seeing the community groupthink to start showing itself for Season 7. And once it started to surface... I found that I almost universally disagreed with the sentiment. This was a show I was watching at the same time as everyone else, and I was witnessing the collective opinion being formed in real time... close enough for the presented opinions to influence my own. Instead I found that, with very few exceptions, the growing consensus was exactly opposite my own as far as the relative quality of individual episodes. I was seeing the show at the same rate, with the same ability to digest my experience, and rarely coming to the same conclusion. Even the presented reasoning for their impressions didn't do much to sway me.
And so I learned a valuable lesson.
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