How much time do you give an 'almost'?

When we've got this much TV to choose from, how much is too much of a show that doesn't quite work?

I’m stubborn, and I also have a near-pathological inability to walk away from a narrative unfinished, so I know why I finish almost everything I start watching. In this age of peak TV, though, I think it’s a fair question to ask how much time you’re supposed to give something before you decide that your time would be better spent elsewhere.

I’ve been thinking about this in light of two new shows that I’m watching. In both cases, it is because of the pedigree of the shows that I am investing my time and attention, and in both cases, I’m don’t think the shows completely work. Does that mean they’re not worth my time? After all, there’s an avalanche of content every week, and there’s always something else I could be watching.

Do I need to watch everything?

Can I even remotely begin to watch everything?

Should I even try?

On paper, both Avenue 5 and Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet should be slam-dunk home runs for me. After all, I love Iannucci’s work as a whole and I think It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is as strong now as it’s ever been. These are new shows from those creative teams, and they both seem like the kind of shows that would speak directly to me. Avenue 5 is a science-fiction comedy about a bunch of rich assholes trapped on a pleasure cruise around Saturn that’s gone terribly wrong, while Mythic Quest is a dark comedy set inside a game development company headed by a huge egomaniac lunatic. One stars Hugh Laurie and a murderer’s row of improvisational comedy performers, and the other stars Rob McElhenney and was co-created with Megan Ganz and has a dense cast of writer-performers and wickedly funny actors like F. Murray Abraham and Danny Pudi. Yes, please, and yes, please, again. Those both sound like shows I would have picked up if I were in charge of a streaming service or a network.

In practice, both shows are almosts. I’ve seen the entire first season of Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, and I’ve seen the first four episodes of Avenue 5, and I like one a little bit more than the other, but in both cases, I would say the shows have things about them that I like, things I don’t, and things that just baffle me as choices. Maybe I want to see a second season of Mythic Quest. Maybe Avenue 5 gets great by the end of the season. Maybe I’ll hang around to find out. Maybe.

But is maybe enough when there are this many choices?

Armando Ianucci has a terrific track record so far. If he had co-created Alan Partridge and then quit the business, that would have been a delightful legacy. He went on to Radio 4 with On The Hour and BBC2’s The Day Today, both important and influential, then made The Armando Iannucci Shows, bold, personal comedy that helped pave the way for him to make The Thick Of It, which pretty much ruled. Blistering, angry, and endlessly rewatchable, The Thick Of It gave way to In The Loop, another triumph, which gave way to Veep, and all of it worked. All of it felt like it was of a piece, the same consistent voice. I adore The Death of Stalin, which felt like the evolution of that voice. So I am baffled when I watching Avenue 5 each week and it just doesn’t feel like it’s cooked completely.

Part of it is the tone. Sci-fi comedy is hard, and it’s because there’s a real trick to being big and broad while also creating a reality that makes sense. So far, much of the comedy is based on escalation as things keep going from bad to worse, and I like the underlying idea that this is about roasting exactly the kinds of people who would be on an intergalactic space tour around Saturn. Tormenting a boatful of rich assholes for a few years works for me conceptually. I can even see how the building blocks they’re using could pay off, like the couple who is about to divorce who suddenly get stuck together for years, or the captain who’s really just an actor who was hired to play a role. So far, though, none of the big reveals have landed right, and the comedy dynamics don’t seem to be paying off. Things have been revealed too early or in the wrong way or in a way that’s almost thrown away, and even if I can admire some clever moves on paper, the execution so far is confounding.

Hugh Laurie is, frankly speaking, a gift. He’s one of those actors who makes it all look infuriatingly easy, and who can play smart or stupid with equal aplomb. If he’s the lead of the show, that’s great, but I’m not sure who the lead is. I’m not sure there is a lead. I’m not sure what the perspective is. There are so many characters in so many different spaces that every episode so far feels like we’re just jumping frantically from spot to spot, checking in on every front rather than actually playing out full scenes or ideas. I haven’t laughed once at NASA or the Avenue 5 Earth headquarters, and it feels like the show might have been better off knocking out communications to Earth in the pilot so they can just stop dealing with it altogether. There are characters that I think work, like Ethan Phillips’ constantly-on-the-make hippie yoga instructor or Karen, the pushiest passenger of all time, but just as many that don’t, like Zach Woods as the customer relations specialist who is so deeply and completely off-the-rails that I’m not sure how he ever got the job. The idea of a truly humane and empathetic customer service guy slowly cracking the longer they’re in space is a good one, but there’s no evolution here. Woods just went insane on day one and it’s all super-profane and crazy and nonsensical now. It’s a shame because I love him as a performer. This cast is just packed with stone-cold killers like Suzy Nakamura or the always-great Jessica St. Clair, and these are funny people, so of course, they score laughs. But it never comes together into a world I believe, and with so much time spent just explaining the premise or the details of the tech every week, the comedy feels like it’s sneaking in around the edges of things.

I think Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet is more successful as a whole, and maybe I’ll feel different if I stick around for the rest of Avenue 5’s first season… but should I have to wait nine episodes to know if I like something? With Mythic Quest, it was the pedigree that kept me watching long enough to get to episode five, which marks a fairly major departure from the format. The show is set at a gaming studio, and it’s about time we started seeing some pop culture built around one of the largest industries in the world right now, but while this show is wrapped in lots of gaming credibility (Ashly Burch’s presence alone should reassure hardcore gaming nerds that someone here knows what they’re talking about), overall, it’s much more about what it’s like to work for a raging narcissist in a high-pressure situation, and here’s where the Megan Ganz connection gets interesting. She’s been on Sunny for many years now, but her time working for Dan Harmon on Community has been well-documented, and she’s talked about how their dynamic became abusive. There are some very real things at play in the relationship between Ian (Rob McElhenney) and Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao), and it feels like the show builds to the understanding that these people don’t exist in a vacuum. It understands how you get pulled into this person’s orbit and why you would stay there, and it doesn’t make excuses for it just like it doesn’t condemn completely. If the show does continue, I think they could build it into a very smart and lacerating look at the way we reward this idea of the crazy damaged abusive genius, and how toxic that idea is.

The episode I mentioned earlier comes halfway through the season, and it stars Jake Johnson and Cristin Milioti. It does not feature anyone else from the show’s cast. It is a stand-alone bit of storytelling written by Katie McElhenney that traces the entire life-cycle of a game, starting with a great meet-cute between Doc (Johnson) and Bean (Milioti) in a video-game store. They start talking, they realize they share some core values and some intense attraction, and they just… connect. They end up making a game together. They end up selling that game. They end up becoming very successful. They end up making a sequel. They build a studio. And the entire time, they accept compromise after compromise, and it eats away at their company, their ideals, their relationship. It is a beautifully realized short film, and it does a terrific job of hanging a frame on the idea that every one of those games you see in a bargain-bin box represents a full life… hundreds of them, actually, all colliding for a short and intense period of time where you build this thing that you hope people will like and use and that you pray actually resembles the original idea you had that made you want to make it in the first place. For all of those people, it’s this huge journey, and for you, it’s $2.99, just something you find as part of a jumbled box full of other now-discarded dreams. They drop a moment in episode nine that finally brings this episode, “A Dark, Quiet Death,” back in a full-circle, and it does feel like the kind of thing that gives me hope that Mythic Quest will go from “promising but muted” in year one to something freer to simply be funny in year two.

Maybe that’s part of the problem… both Avenue 5 and Mythic Quest are plot-heavy comedies, very serialized, and it’s one of those things that I find interesting as we reach peak TV. Many shows these days have moved to the heavily-serialized model, which is fine, but some of my favorite comedies are less about plot and more about giving characters room to run. I like the characters in Mythic Quest. David Hornsby, Ashly Burch, Aparna Nancherla, Jessie Ennis, Imani Hakim, Danny Pudi, F. Murray Abraham… all of them have been given ample material to build interesting people, and they’re all great at fleshing out these weirdos quickly and making them feel authentic. That’s when I get excited to watch a comedy, because it becomes all about watching these characters you like bounce off each other in different ways, and you know it’ll be interesting whatever happens. I like that many of the actors are also writers on the show. I feel like the “plot” that dominates the first season could have been a two-part pilot for the show, and now that it’s out of the way, I’d like to see them just settle into the running of the business. McElhenney and Nicdao have terrific chemistry as Ian and Poppy, and exploring the weird and broken dynamic between them is a promising foundation, one the show has now firmly established.

I don’t blame anyone who drops out of either of the shows. In the case of Mythic Quest, I think there are rewards for sticking it out, but there are always so many choices available on any given night that I get it if you don’t feel like waiting around for a great episode five. I’m also not sure there’s a single show on Apple TV+ that demands you add them to your subscriptions yet, and that’s an issue. It’s an entire streaming service full of almosts, which does not add up to a must-see. Not anymore. Not when there are so many choices. There are so many shows that I haven’t seen a single episode of, and I’d like to eventually try all of them, but that means I have to be willing to tap out if something’s not for me. I watch a lot of this with my girlfriend, but there are TV shows she doesn’t care about, and figuring out which is which means watching a few of them together. We just powered through every episode of Succession in about a month, and we couldn’t wait to watch the next one each time. Same thing with our favorite shows like Mrs. Maisel or Game of Thrones or This Is Us. We’ll watch them as soon as they’re available. In other cases, we’ll try a few and then just realize we’re not compelled to come back for whatever reason. We made it two and a half episodes into On Becoming a God In Central Florida before we moved on, and it was just a case of tone not working for us. It might be great. It might get great. But it felt like so much heavy lifting that it was more exhausting than entertaining. We just tried Ozark finally, and we’re digging it, but it’s so grim and so busy that we can only do one at a time. Some shows can just sit on a shelf for when you need them, like Big Mouth, which always makes us laugh until we cry, but which we parcel out carefully so we can watch them after something grim or awful. We’ve got shows like The Americans and Justified that we haven’t seen a frame of yet that we’ll try soon, and just knowing that there are these entire shows that people loved that we haven’t seen is enough to make me move on when I’m not enjoying something.

I’m curious what keeps you watching a show if you immediately fall in love with it… or do you? Do you tap out early? I’m going to open comments on this piece, so please jump in.

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Image courtesy Apple TV+