People keep calling old shows 'slow' but they just don't get the pacing

Tbh I was watching The Wire again last week and my buddy walked in and said 'this is too slow' after ten minutes. He's missing that the whole point is building up the neighborhood and characters over time before anything big happens.

2 comments

2 Comments

troy43912h ago

Honestly I feel you on this one. When people call old shows "slow" I think they're just used to everything happening at 100 miles per hour now with no room to breathe. The thing is shows like The Wire or The Sopranos weren't slow for no reason, they were letting you sit with the characters and the world so the payoff actually meant something. I remember trying to get a friend into Better Call Saul and he said the first season was boring, but that's the whole point. You gotta earn those big moments by taking your time getting there. Not everything needs to be a YouTube Shorts compilation.

faith_thomas12h ago

People get way too worked up over this stuff. It's a TV show, not a meditation class. Some of those old shows were slow because they had to fill 22 episodes a season with not enough story. The Wire is great but let's not pretend there aren't stretches where nothing happens for three episodes. I watch slower stuff sometimes but I don't act like it makes me better than people who like faster shows. Different strokes for different folks, it's not that deep.