I’m currently watching Outer Range on Amazon Prime and kinda loving it. It’s a creepy as fuck cowboy time travel saga, and it is my jam.
But it’s not my most watched show. That’d be Justified. Again. And not the remake (which was fine), but the OG series.
It kept turning up in my Youtube feed, and finally, I gave in one day when I had an hour to kill and no energy for something new (or for creepy as fuck cowboy time travel shenanigans).
I plated up the first ep, and… well, here we are again. I’m knee-deep in season two now. I don’t know why I’m doing this. I have a long list of unwatched series and movies I fully intend to get to. But they would require more… I dunno… investment? Committment?
I know I can drop into an EP of Justified, and it won’t matter if I don’t finish it in one go. I don’t necessarily remember how they all end. I couldn’t even recall the resolution of the major villain arc for S1. But I guess it feels like the stakes are low because I have been there before, and I know I’ll enjoy it all over again.
I suspect that’s what keeps taking Jane back to Star Trek. She’s watched all of those series multiple times now, but if I wake up at two or three in the morning and find her awake, that’ll be what she has on the iPad. I can’t really question it, can it, having slunk back to Harlan County.
There’s undoubtedly a whole New Yorker think piece in this, but I doubt they’re gonna pay me for six months to rewatch Justified and think it over. So, I guess I gotta come to my own conclusions. It might just be nostalgia and familiarity, reheating favoured memories and feelings with minimal effort, like microwave cheese sauce. This sort of thing can be appealing when you're tired or stressed, and who isn’t these days?