(no subject)

Breaking Bad 4 was really good for a fourth season, maybe better than the previous ones objectively - can't remember well enough to say. But some of the bloom's gone. Eventually you get too good of a sense of what a show won't become, are left with what it merely is. The crowning excitement early in a television show's run - one that's excited you in every other way, at least - is similar to what you feel with a new president you support, or some kinds of new personal relationships. You're locked in, ready to be loyal, as yet undisappointed.

Unlike with exciting movies you've invested a piece of your future. And until you start minding you're delighted that you still don't mind. Some of the open expectations we let ourselves have about life itself in certain seasons of youth or morning get applied to entertainments made by people who are just as thrilled to have merited them, but who only have hunches about how to keep doing so, and a limited number of those. Something's alive that shouldn't be, and since no one knows quite how it isn't for long.

Part of the loyalty The Wire earns for its third and fourth seasons is for how well it fights that necrosis off. Not perfectly, even there, but well. We've been hesitating to even start five.

How should you surprise me next? Surprise me.