Watching/Not Watching

I used to be the kind of person who never left a movie no matter how bad, who always finished a book no matter how painful. Sometimes that was a professional duty, sometimes just a matter of stubbornness, or a feeble hope that whatever was watching would get better.

I have been thinking about this somewhat often with The Flight Attendant, the HBO Max thriller starring Kaley Cuoco, which has been picked up for a second season. I have gotten through three episodes of the first season so far, but keep asking myself why. 

Sure, there are plot twists I am mildly interested in following, but everything feels so stretched out, the scenes of Cuoco's character's excesses so repetitive, that I am weary of it. My wife and I have a two-episode rule for most series -- that if you don't have us after two, you won't get us back -- so there's some reason for me still in there for three. But it could just be that old stubbornness,

And that is not the only time recently when I have grown exhausted early in a production. The Prom is so forced in the early going, so smug-seeming about the characters, that not even Meryl Streep and company could keep me going. Holidate proved its dreadfulness almost immediately. Mank began as a largely witless chronicle of a bitterly witty man. Good as Gary Oldman is, the production takes banter that should fly and grounds it in slow delivery -- it's dialogue at the pace of the current postal service. 

I may go back to these sometime -- well, Mank anyway, to see how the later parts play in the Mank-vs-Orson debates -- but one thing that makes that difficult is there is so much more out there (or, more precisely in these times, in here) to watch. Some of it is genuinely great, too. And some of it is just good enough or diverting enough that I can actually sit through all of it.

This, however, does not explain how I managed to sit through Mariah Carey's dreadful Christmas special, an overdone exercise in ego and cleavage. I should be ashamed, but not as much as Carey should be.