What TV show did you start watching late in the game?

I've read a couple of recent posts on TV Squad from a woman named Jane Boursaw about her experiences having just finished watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for the first time. Almost six years since "Buffy" went off the air and 12 since it premiered, she sat down and watched all seven seasons on DVD. It's not that surprising that she hadn't watched much of "Buffy" before then -- there are obviously millions of people who have never seen an episode -- but that she took the time to watch all seven seasons at this point. This made me think about TV shows that people started watching either years after they went off the air, or after they've already been on the air for several seasons.

What makes you decide to watch now? And if those shows were cult favorites, did they live up to the hype? For example, I have never seen an episode of the recent "Battlestar Gallactica" series. The show's seasons are in my Netflix queue and I fully intend to watch, but just haven't yet. At this point, it probably just makes sense to wait until the final season is out on DVD; unfortunately, I found out the identity of the fifth Cylon. I also didn't watch "Jericho" or "Dead Like Me" until they were off the air, and I really enjoyed both.

So what shows did you just discover? I wonder if there's anyone who thought, 'Huh, that 'ER' show is going off the air after 15 years, I wonder what that's all about?" OK, that's probably a pretty extreme example, but I still remember being shocked when a co-worker told me he'd never seen more than a minute of a single episode of "Friends." I would have been more surprised if he'd told me he was a huge fan of "Friend," but it's one of the shows that you can't walk without tripping over, so I don't know how he managed not to catch even 10 minutes of it. I have friends who have never seen "House" or "Lost" and going back to "Buffy," one friend whose "Buffy" experience is forever frozen at the end of Season 5 when the reruns she was watching stopped going in order and went back to the earlier seasons.

There is a dangerous amount of TV on the air right now, and an endless amount of ways to catch up on older shows or early seasons of shows, so missing out on a lot of shows isn't a surprise. It just comes down to, how did you decide which show to finally watch? Were any of the major plot points ruined for you or did you manage to avoid having it spoiled? And was the experience different watching it after most people were already done?


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