I'm blessed, if that's the word to use, with a greater-than-average amount of patience. I didn't get restless or bored in the middle of shows like Texhnolyze or Mushi-shi, shows where the fact that anything happens at all in a given episode can be the most striking thing about it. Then again, I doubt that patience was something I was born with — it's something I cultivated consciously, especially since those shows and mant more like them were things I'd been assigned to report back on (although I might well have watched them even if I hadn't been). That said, I completely see where people are coming from when they give themselves three episodes, tops, for a show to click for them before they go grazing in greener pastures. In a world this crowded with things to watch, play, read, and listen to, who wouldn't want to tighten their personal gatekeeping a bit?
Nothing, something, anything
Chicago-era theater owner Oscar Brotman was reputed to have been a font of acid wit when it came to the movies. He had little patience, it seemed, for films that "took their time" or "didn't rush things". "If nothing happens by the first reel of a movie," he once opined, "then nothing's going to happen." He was taking what I now see as an avowedly populist point of view; after all, most people go to the movies to, you know, see something happening. But for folks who have seen a few things in their lifetime, the something that happens doesn't have to consist of an explosion or a shoot-out or a punch in the nose.
With anime, the problem most often isn't ennui or inertia. If anything, it's the exact opposite: most shows do anything and everything in their power to attract and keep our attention. So much so, in fact, that when a show tries the understated approach, that to me is a tipoff there may be more on its mind than just distracting us for a few minutes at a time.
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That said, the fact a show is taking the slow road doesn't always correlate with quality. For every Texhnolyze or Mushi-shi there's a Gasaraki, a show that should have come with toothpicks to prop open one's eyes while watching. Still, do find that most of the shows that dare to unfold at their own pace and in their own timeframe are worth the effort. The catch is that they require more of an investment of time to pay off, so the three-episodes-and-I'm-out formula won't work for them; you end up missing out.
That's the first problem I have with the three-episodes formula: it erects a barrier to material that really does need more than three episodes to kick in. Stumping for such shows means you have to insist on people waiting that much longer, and that by itself is deadly advice. When is it ever a winning strategy to tell people the fact that (almost) nothing happens is actually a good sign, that all the things they might normally go to a show for in the first place (action! excitement! forward plot movement!) are either submerged or eschewed entirely? If the whole point of talking about anime is to argue for when we see it as being at its best, isn't it hard to do that by singling out things that most audiences will see as examples of at its worst?
Waiting through the setup, waiting for the payoff
The only answer I have to that right now is to simply accept that not everyone is going to shelve their impatience, and that the people who aren't in the habit of doing so probably aren't the prospective audience for such things anyway. Still, sometimes it helps to arm people ahead of time with some idea of what putting in more than three episodes' worth of viewing time will do for them. Not that this is a guarantee they'll finish, or even agree with you that their time was well spent. The point is to gamble on what they, in turn, will also gamble on. Get them past those first three episodes, and there's a good chance they'll stick with something the rest of the way through.
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That, in turn, brings up the second question: Why, specifically, three episodes? I go back to Brotman again: if something of substance doesn't happen across the course of three episodes, nothing will. The first two are for the sake of letting whatever happens in the first episode lapse into the second, and the third is just for safety's sake. I recall Darker Than Black* having some fairly pivotal stuff happen in the third episode that cinched my interest in the show and moved its needle from "casual" to "committed".
Critics and experienced viewers alike know that a show needs time to set things up, but three episodes seems the outer limit of how much setup people are willing to wait through. If by the end of the third episode, you can't answer these three questions, then I wouldn't blame anyone for bailing:
- Who is this show about?
- What are they facing down? (or, what is it about?)
- How are the characters dealing with the situation they're presented with?
- What's the tone of the material like? Is it something that sits well with you, or badly?
- Does it seem like the show is willing to push its own envelope, or just sit comfortably within the conceit it's sketching out?
Note that the answers to those questions don't have to be ones you like in order for a show to work. By the first three episodes of something like Fairy Tail, it's flagrantly clear the show isn't out to push any envelopes; that's not likely to be a strike against it for most people. (It isn't for me, since the show isn't promising anything it doesn't eventually deliver.) But there have to be answers to all of these things, and any show that can't supply them coherently in three episodes isn't going about its business.
On wrinkling one's nose
Whether or not you like what's going on is another issue, and again, the most subjective and difficult one. And that brings me to the third question that comes to mind: Given all of the above, to what extent is the three-episodes limit a good defense against bad wastes of time, or a trap?
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I've stuck with shows that seemed aimless and poorly programmed, if only because there was some portion of the premise or some character in the lineup that I wanted to stick with. But I also know better than to speak of that as anything but a personal thing; it's unwise to recommend a show on the basis of something you're not even sure other people will pick up on. I admired Shangri-la* for being a mad mash of genres — a post-eco-apocalyptic cyberpunk prison picture fantasy adventure comedy (no, "prison picture" is not a misprint) — but I knew full well that alone doesn't add up to a thumbs-up for many people. It might constitute one for the people who are, in fact, looking for audacity and outlandishness for its own sake, but most of us aren't like that — most of us want a well-told story about people wen can give a darn about. If there's no hint of such a thing forthcoming by the time three episodes are up, there's not much sense in holding your breath.
Most people miss nothing if they bail after three episodes, but the specific nothing they're missing is always subjective. Most of the shows I bail on are not the "boring" ones, but the ones that try too hard to be anything but boring. You know the kind: a spread-spectrum buckshot of character and story, the anime version of four-quadrant marketing. (The naive but good-hearted heroine; the cool girl with the glasses; the rowdy one ... keep ticking off the boxes.) Any season will be cluttered with these copies of copies, and I never feel like I'm missing out if I skip such a thing.
Likewise, I have a hard time constructing an argument that someone is "missing out" if they bail on a show I stuck with and can make a case for. It's not as if there's no temptation to condemn them for short-changing themselves, but I know that condemnation doesn't do anything except put us into artificially different categories: I, the Enlightened Critic with my copies of Mushi-shi, and that schlub over there with his Bleach box sets. Divisions like that convince nobody.
The point, as I see it, isn't to convince anyone. Rather, it's to build over time a shareable methodology of viewing — a set of understandings about how to approach this stuff that can be experienced as a free-floating ethic, rather than as a set of hard rules that nobody adheres to anyway. Similar sets of understandings have sprung up around, say, Bollywood, or Hong Kong films. Anime deserves no less, and perhaps we can provide it by reminding each other that there's no shame in doing a little gatekeeping of our viewing — as long as it doesn't come at the expense of broadening our own horizons.
