We like "Doc Martin", a show from British TV. We watch it on Acorn, a streaming channel we get with our Roku streamer. It is a subscription channel and costs about $7.00 a month, maybe less if a year is purchased at a time. It may be free to watch, possibly with ads inserted, on the Roku streaming channel itself. With Doc Martin as with "Call the Midwife", and "Jane the Virgin", when we reached the end of all the seasons, we started over and watched it all again. That has been a good practice since the shows are too numerous to recall each one. We are in our 80's and don't have all that minute memories, anyhow.
This business of watching them again makes me think of the subject of re-reading a book. From the book "On Repeat" by Dr. Elizabeth Margulis, I got the idea of comparing repeating an experience of listening to music I like. It is true that musical compositions do not tend to run as long as it takes to read some books, but for that and maybe other reasons, we tend to play it or listen again more readily that we read again. I suppose watching a full length movie falls in between. The likelihood of re-watching a 2 hour movie may be lower than the chance of listening to music over again but higher than reading a full-sized book.
When we are re-watching, I usually feel "comfortable" with the story as it progresses but I can almost never exactly predict the next scene or event. Mostly, I don't think to even try. I tend to feel and appreciate the story and the decisions that characters play instead.
The question of what remains in the memory after having read, watched or listened is a natural one for a teacher or instructor. Many high school and higher ed students read and re-read a passage, a chapter or a paper with the purpose of being prepared to answer questions about the content on a test. In my graduate course "Reading for Professional Development", I encouraged students, mature, experienced teachers themselves, to look back over their lives and see what books made a difference to them. That sometimes led to a student re-reading a book from earlier decades. I guess most of the time, the re-reading repeated the positive judgment but sometimes, the more mature reader felt the book did not merit a high rating.
