When you fall in love with a television show, it’s almost never an all at once, love-at-first-sight type deal; it builds up, over time, a collection of little moments and jokes (or dramatic scenes, or explosions, or whatever it is that you like) over the course of a number of episodes.
That being said, you can probably find (and point to) a moment, a joke that turned you, when you realized that you were in it for the long haul. On 30 Rock, it took the “Captain Needa” joke to really hook me in:
On Community, although I enjoyed the pilot much more than most people I know, it was really the moment between Abed and his father in “Introduction to Film” where the show really first showed its heart (I can’t find the moment but here’s the short film Abed makes that affects his father):
And last night’s Ben & Kate was what really did it for me; it was the episode that really showed the heart underneath it all – a heart that we knew was there, but for the first time, the show really let us see.
It tied together three successful stories (Ben and his sadness over losing out on the future he thought he had, Kate and her old friend coming to an understanding that although they’re in different places in their lives, they’ll still be friends, and Tommy’s runner that reveals his own regret and why he’s so mad about once loaning out fifteen dollars) that all fundamentally explored the notion of past vs. present and our expectations of how our lives will go vs. how they actually go.
To top it all off, they How I Met Your Mother-ed us (in a good way) by using a little bit of unreliable narrator technique to show us that the idea that Kate spent her birthdays alone wasn’t quite true – earning a nice, heartfelt moment without getting cheesy.
And for me, they provided something even more important: that moment that hooked me. That made me realize that I’m in it for the long haul.
Now here’s hoping Fox (and America) agrees.
