What do television shows look like in our mind’s eye? Let me start with a personal experience. Two shows that I enjoyed immensely – Sex Education and The Mandalorian – seemed, to me at least, to have reached satisfying conclusions in their third and second seasons, respectively. But not in the same way. In The Mandalorian, the title character (played by Pedro Pascal and also named Din Djarin) had completed a longstanding mission to handover the strange ‘Child’ creature (also named Grogu) to a Jedi. Given that the creature had become something like a surrogate child to the Mandalorian, this was a moment of emotional climax in the show, apparently bringing to a close their adventure-of-the-week heroics (which pleasingly replicated the structure of 70s and 80s shows like The Incredible Hulk, The A-Team and The Littlest Hobo). It was a fitting end. Sex Education, on the other hand, finished its third season on a series of question marks, with its teenage characters embarking on an unknown future as they edged towards adulthood, their school symbolically closed after being sold to developers. Matters were unresolved and uncertain, with even central couple Otis (Asa Butterfield) and Maeve (Emma Mackey) on the cusp of being split across continents. And this felt perfect. Sex Education never seemed like a show that would chase easy resolutions or crave the convenience of closure. So, while bonds of friendship remained strong, the straightforward comforts of a settled, predictable future were largely resisted.

The problem (or, rather, my problem) is that both shows then carried on for a further season. The Mandalorian shed its agile associations with the Star Wars universe and instead became embroiled in aspects of its ‘lore.’ I can’t really remember what any of the characters were trying to do – there seemed to be baptisms, people taking their helmets on and off, and some kind of deep-water dinosaur. Meanwhile, Sex Education felt like it had become a different show, with slightly dreary new characters crowding out the originals. Again, I can’t really remember much about it, but the sharpness and lightness seemed to have gone, and nothing really moved forward at the end of it all. As I say, my problem.

The odd thing I realised is that, when I think of The Mandalorian and Sex Education, I just leave out those final seasons. When I rewatched both shows partly for pleasure and partly for work, I didn’t revisit those batches of episodes at all. I’m entirely open to the idea that there’s something wrong with me, but they feel complete without those seasons. In fact, I would say they are better for it. So, I wonder if other people do this too, at least to varying degrees. Do Game of Thrones fans block out a disappointing finale? Do Friends devotees overlook the episodes when Joey and Rachel got together? It’s often remarked that shows like Parks and Recreation have uncharacteristically weak first seasons, so is it OK to just imagine they don’t exist?

Given that shows can take time to find their feet (hence the weaker starts) or continue past their peak (ditto the disappointing endings), or even encounter events like writers’ strikes, it seems quite likely that quality will fluctuate across episodes and seasons. So, when we’re saying a show is great or even good (or bad or terrible), we might well be omitting a significant heap of contradictory evidence. The show in our mind’s eye might not be the show in its entirety. But why should that interest television studies?

Well, it could simply remind us that notions of ‘quality’ and ‘achievement’ are not fixed and are always subjective. Indeed, leaving out entire episodes or seasons might constitute a particularly extreme form of discrimination. But it can also reinforce the idea that viewers exert great control over the shape and form of the television text as it is remembered. Without wishing to unwittingly summon the author-killing ghost of Barthes, we have the agency to reimagine shows through our selective memory of them. Fairly recently, I’ve taken an interest in how legacy film studies ideas of coherence, balance and unity might need revision if they are applied to television studies. What happens to these concepts when they are stretched from a single film to multiple seasons of a television show? My feeling is that we run into difficulties with a lot of shows if we want to describe them as single, unified, coherent texts (and I mention my own suspicion that House of Cards started to undo some of its early strengths as the seasons stacked up). But what if we are storing reimagined versions of these shows by omitting some bits and placing greater emphasis on others? I wonder if we’re creating new coherence through that process, which in turn informs our claims for things like quality and achievement. Or maybe we could think of it as a type of curated recall, as we re-organise the content into a more pleasing form, with all the messy bits boxed up and stored away from view.

No doubt there’s reams of research on memory and cognition that give a far better account of this kind of thing, whereas this is essentially a blog about my own odd behaviour. But, given that television studies is quite often interested in the form that television content takes, it might be worth considering whether its ultimate form is memory. We carry around catalogues of shows in our minds all the time, possibly using them to influence our thoughts and opinions. My catalogue is faulty, no doubt. But – and I’m bound to say this – maybe the faults are worth thinking about.

 

James Walters is Professor of Screen Aesthetics and Criticism at the University of Birmingham. His new book, Visions in the Frame: Mise-en-scène Between Film and Television is published in June 2026.