Different tastes in television

[mtbc]

Britain has some dramas that are more like soap operas such as the contemporary Casualty (1986) and period dramas like Poldark (2015). They are not of the kind of drama that I like to watch. There are other kinds where my opinion is less clear-cut.

Even within genres I am intrigued by diversity of opinion. For example, some sitcoms are positively polarizing. I rather enjoyed Arrested Development (2003), enough to rewatch it, but it is the kind of show that people either love or would rather miss. If somebody didn't like it, how much credence should I give their recommendation of Son of Zorn (2016)? It is hard for me to tell. Are there multiple axes within a genre that we can somehow discover through clustering ratings and determine usefully predictive principal components? It is a thorny problem.

If we narrow very specifically to dramas in which time travelers from an apocalyptic future attempt to change that outcome by meddling with the present day, I much enjoyed Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008) but, of present series, I find Travelers (2016) worth watching but hardly unmissable. Yet some people love Travelers but found Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles so boring that they didn't make it through to the end even once. What is it that causes me to like one but them to like the other?

Even I do not understand my own preferences. For example, though I found it slow at times, I rather liked Prisoners of War (2009) but found Fauda (2015) reasonable but less good. I don't know why I didn't like Fauda more: it wasn't slow, has distinct characters, progression of arc, made some sense, tied things up well, gave me a window into another world, etc. Perhaps I can do no better than to keep reading reviews and trying shows out.