Of course, I was born well after the internet went online, only a stone's throw after the dot-com bubble. What I mean is that when I was growing up, the internet was still relegated to a single room of the home. Devices were truly shared. We had to deal with there being nothing good on the TV. Contrast this with those born a few years after me. They always had the entire compendium of media in the palm of their hand. The 18-year-olds of today have lived their entire lives coexisting with smartphones.

The youth have no memory of this!

My parents, being older, took their time switching over from analog to digital. We still had a massive CRT TV well into the early 2010s, though it was largely unused in those last few years. Same goes for our VHS player and collection of tapes.

I remember flipping through cable channels, trying to find something to watch, and stumbling upon a show halfway through an episode. For shows you were familiar with, it was easy to piece together what that episode was about. But when you were trying a new show, there would be the fun of trying to figure out what was going on. One show I vividly remember misunderstanding was Wizards of Waverly Place. For whatever reason, my six-year-old mind did not recognise that the father character and the magic teacher character were in fact not two entirely different characters. I don't know why I did not recognise that it was the same actor; it's not like he had a dramatic costume or makeup change whenever he was serving his role as the magic teacher. Eventually I figured it out, but it was fun trying to piece together the story of the show from the sporadic reruns.

Every once in a while they'd finally air an episode from an earlier season that would solve one of those question marks that were lying around in my head. That "AH HA!" moment was almost always better than the actual payoff from the story. It gave you a reason to read through the TV guide, to see if they might just air one of these episodes at two in the morning.

Streaming mostly killed this experience with media. If you start a new show or series, you almost always are going to start from the beginning. You're going to know all the information each episode adds.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It gives writers the ability to craft more complex stories, since they can rely on the audience knowing the plot points that got the characters from A to B. However, as an audience member, I do sometimes miss the experience of figuring it out.

It still happens accidentally from time to time. I'll join friends or family in watching something they've already started, or I miss the first 10 minutes of a movie because of traffic on the way to the theater.

One particularly fun time was when I watched the last episode of the first season of The X-Files thinking I was watching the pilot. For those who haven't watched it, it starts off in a courtroom with one of the leads, Mulder, accusing a man of being a centuries-old alien that subsisted on eating people's spleens. The whole time I was thinking, "I knew this show was weird, but this was a bold choice to open with". Over the course of the episode, I picked up on the fact that something was wrong, eventually realizing that the sketchy streaming site I was on had them listed in reverse order. Watching them the right way around finally made it make sense, but that memory of being so utterly confused yet nevertheless captivated sticks with me.

This weekend I got to relive that experience.

My girlfriend started watching the show Outer Banks a couple years back. She'd tell me bits and pieces; I knew there was a character named John B, that his friends tell him to "bring it on home", and there was treasure-hunting involved, but that's about it. The final season had just come out and she was itching to watch it. I wasn't gonna pass up the opportunity to do something with her, even if I didn't know the full backstory.

The first episode was somewhat confusing, as I didn't know who was a main character and who were just extras. It served to wrap up an arc that had started in the previous season, as well as to set up the main storyline of this season. By the end of the second episode, I got it. I didn't know everything, but I had a pretty good understanding of the characters, their relationships, and their motives. I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the show and don't think I missed a ton by not seeing the previous four seasons, but it left me wanting to see the rest of it.

I watched the pilot immediately after the finale and it raised more questions than it answered. Now there's a meta-mystery of how these poor, island-dwelling delinquents get wrapped up in brawls with members of an international artifact theft ring.

There's something to having missing pieces that adds to the experience. It's like putting together a puzzle, except you don't have the picture on the box to guide you. Even if the picture isn't particularly good, the mere challenge of needing to assemble it makes it a more fun experience.