What have you hate-watched and why?

[aco175]

My wife and I try to have a show or two we watch, which is mostly her shows but she is starting to like History Channel. She did get me to like Friends and I found Gray's Anatomy ok at this point. Strange she leaves and not gives Walking Dead or GOT a chance though. She does watch General Hospital upstairs away from me since I keep asking questions about who is who and the affliction known as SORAS (soap opera rapid aging syndrome) that affects the children on these shows. She never let me down with wasting 90 minutes of her life with Monty Python over 10 years ago.

 

[GreyLord]

If I don't enjoy something I normally stop doing it.

With video game RPGs I DO keep playing even if I dislike it. I normally have what I call the 24 hour rule. I play the game for a total of 24 hours. Thus, I've given it a chance. If I am still not having fun at that point, I drop it and never look back. There have been times when I was hating the game at the 4-6 hour mark, but ended up loving it by the 24 hour mark. Other times, it's just as dreadful.

TV shows have less leniency. If I don't enjoy it after anywhere from 1-3 episodes, I drop it. I don't want to waste time watching TV shows I really don't enjoy.

 

[Worrgrendel]

"Hate" may be too strong a word for most cases. But "hate-watch" is a pretty useful way to condense "Watching something that you know you don't actually take pleasure in but end up sitting through the whole way for some other reason" down to 9 letters. If you have a better term, I'm happy to hear it. As to the "why?", I think I gave four pretty reasonable answers in the opening post.

No. I do not have another term that fits the bill but I think "hate watch" overshoots the mark by a mile. So let's go through the "why's?"

- Being semi-forced to watch by a significant other, family member or friend group.

I love my wife and vise versa and we have a lot of interests in common. That being said I have shows I like that she does not and she has shows that she likes that I do not. We do not force the other to watch shows we do not have interest in. That's leading down the road to therapy and marriage issues.

- Completion.

I have done this one time for as long as I can remember and I have regretted it for every day since. When the live action movie The Last Airbender came out my wife and I and a large group of friends all went to see it. My wife, bless her heart was the only one of us smart enough to leave the movie 5 minutes into it and get her money back. She had to sit and listen to us Nerd Rage about it for hours. Again, if it's that bad why continue to watch it?

Edit: damn it. I did do it again. Curse you Rise of Skywalker! Man what a dumpster fire. Why did I do that?!? To my credit it had been about 15 years in between screw ups.

- Giving it a (long) chance.

See, this to me does not fall even remotely close into the category of "hate". I have given many shows a (long) chance and have been rewarded on some (Legends of Tomorrow) and not so much on others (The Cape). Some shows start out slow. On all of them that I have gone past an episode I never really felt like I hated them. They just never scratched my itch. I have ended several shows only part way through the first episode or movies only a little bit into them. Basically, I hit the "I hate it point" and that was the end of it. No need to go any further. Life's too short.

- Wanting to understand cultural norms (or: know your enemy). When Twilight came out, it was huge. I knew it would suck. But me and my spouse wanted to at least experience some of it to have a reference point. We made it through the first two movies with a lot of rum. I've also watched movies like Birth of a Nation purely for educational/historical purposes.

If you are using movies as reference for educational/historical purposes I think you can find a better (more accurate, less biased, not Hollywooded up) source for that.
To the understanding of cultural norms: I would hardly classify Twilight as a "cultural norm". Those books/movies turned back teenage social skills by decades by normalizing abuse (both physical and emotional) because its portrayal is deliberately apologetic for it. It exploits behaviors that most people would consider unethical and wrong as romantic and sexual, and she accepts all of those horrible behaviors because she thinks shes in love and that makes it all okay. Oh and suicide is okay too kids, look Bella tried it. She just wasn't that good at it. Unfortunately for the rest of the world. But, hey kids! You can do it better! Just don't be a loser like her!
Sorry for the rant. Basically if I am close enough on a daily basis to need to "know my enemy" I should be rethinking who I am hanging out with.

 

[Ryujin]

Don't worry. The rest of the world will soon catch up to us.

When something with the quality of "Ripper Street" gets cancelled and replaced with "I'm a Celebrity; Get Me Out of Here" (IIRC), the UK isn't far behind.

Political comment removed

 

[Tonguez]

Season 8 GoT

The great thing about digital TV though is that I can watch when I’m othwerwise bored, fast forward the terrible bits Or leave it in the background while I distract myself with ENWorld

 

[billd91]

When something with the quality of "Ripper Street" gets cancelled and replaced with "I'm a Celebrity; Get Me Out of Here" (IIRC), the UK isn't far behind.

Since a lot of our "reality TV content" is an Americanized version of UK programming, I'm not really sure anyone can say the UK is behind us at all. We seem to be in the same handbasket.

 

[Eltab]

I liked The Pretender until they were given the "your final season" notice and they decided to triple-complicate their existing plot threads, plus torment the main characters into lashing out at each other.

Given the premises of the show, the best ending would have been Jared (a super-genius who can do any job for a week even though he is untrained and inexperienced) working as a Congressional staffer and arranging a hearing into how The Centre has embezzled and bamboozled $Millions of Government money. At the end of the hearings, the existing leadership is exposed as frauds / crooks and forced to resign (or get sued into oblivion) and self-"exile to Siberia". Sydney (Jared's father figure and the only sympathetic Centre employee) becomes the new Head of the Centre, with instructions to clean it up. Those instructions are written by and hand-delivered - with a mutual knowing wink - by Jared.

Of course the scriptwriters actually did nothing of the sort, and watching what they did conceive was a form of self-torture.

 

[MarkB]

The only one that comes to mind for me is Lost. I watched most of the first season, but once I realised that most of the show's central mysteries were just as mysterious to the writers as they were to the rest of us, I wrote it off.

However, I had a flatmate at the time who loved it, and since both the TV and my PC were in the living room, I wound up basically watching it by proxy from about season 3 onwards. I never did come round to liking it.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

The only one that comes to mind for me is Lost. I watched most of the first season, but once I realised that most of the show's central mysteries were just as mysterious to the writers as they were to the rest of us, I wrote it off.

However, I had a flatmate at the time who loved it, and since both the TV and my PC were in the living room, I wound up basically watching it by proxy from about season 3 onwards. I never did come round to liking it.

I recently watched Lost. I liked it, but it was very slow paced.

 

[Ulfgeir]

My answer is nothing. I don't even watch all the stuff I WANT to see...

That said, I will have to continue watching Spiderman Homecoming. I do not care for the cringeworthy Peter Parker in the beginning.