And geez, is Bruce Baugh ever right when he describes fandom as constantly searching for reasons not to like things anymore.
I only very recently got into Battlestar Galactica. I’ve got about half of last night’s episode to go before I’m finally all caught up, so I’ve at long last been able to read what people have been writing about the show without fear of spoilage. And simply put, I’ve been stunned by the degree to which ostensible admirers of the show slag each then-new episode as woefully inferior to some mystical pre-lapsarian BSG era that I, for one, have been unable to identify. (See this post at Table of Malcontents (hat tip: Pop Candy), or any comment from “Sheik Yerbouti” over at The House Next Door (example).) You can see this level of intensity in the criticism of shows like The Sopranos or Lost, sure, but in those cases it’s easy enough to pinpoint the turning point: The Sopranos lost people when it stopped being about killing the big bad guy at the end of the season, and Lost lost people when they didn’t show the inside of the hatch at the end of Season One. But having watched all of BSG within the space of about a month or two, I can’t for the life of me figure out any reason for why people are apparently just dying not to like the show anymore, beyond a sort of culture-wide terror of being the last person to stop clapping.