Your argument applies even more to something like Breaking Bad or even the venerable Babylon 5. The strength of those offerings was the build-up over many seasons.
Ugh, and please let's not judge Star Trek TNG on its first season. Yikes!
I'd argue that Babylon 5 retained many of its flaws throughout its run even if, for me, the good aspects outweighed the bad. That said, the first part of its run was pretty weak as was TNG's. I doubt I'd have made it through as a non-genre casual viewer.
I'm going to sacrifice a lot of nerd points by saying this, but the pilot of Babylon 5 was so dreadfully unwatchable for me that I never got past it. I never tried another episode. Everyone I know tells me how much I'd love the show, but for the life of me, I'd rather watch paint dry than sit through another episode.
Perhaps this is a great example of a bad pilot that grew into a decent series?
I watched the whole series for the first time only a couple of years ago. I started it just because, as an old Amiga enthusiast, I remembered about that show from some article I had read years before on a magazine about 3D graphics.
The first two seasons were just OK, but after that something clicked, and the show became really engaging. With some loose ends, but it made me pleasantly waste much more time than I should have on it :)
Maybe I'll give it another shot. Deep Space Nine, launched around the same timeframe, had a similarly weak start. In retrospect, I'm not sure I'd have gotten into it -- or forgiven it some truly dreadful filler episodes -- had I not been pre-sold on Trek by years of TNG. DS9 found its footing around the end of Season 2 and got really good around Season 4 and beyond.
Maybe I owe it to myself to give B5 another go at some point.
Both B5 and DS9 were well worth watching. And both had pretty ehh pilots. (And I'm got going to even touch accusations that the similarities weren't coincidental :-))
I pretty much agree with your take on DS9 even though I ultimately think it became one of the better Trek series.
B5 continued to have some pretty clunky acting in some cases and low-rent special effects but, given your tastes expressed in other posts, you'd probably enjoy it. My only caveat would be that it's somewhat one of those "mystery" shows (run off to the discussions about what this revelation meant) and I'm not sure how well that translates to after-the-fact binge viewing.
I can handle "what did that actually mean?" types of shows, but only if the mystery had some internally logical consistency to it, i.e., it's not just a mindfuck for mindfuck's sake.
A good example would be early-series Lost: lots of interesting mysteries left open to interpretation, giving the impression of more to come, and of a consistent logic to the way things were going to unfold. Bad example would be late-series Lost: it became pretty obvious they'd written themselves into a corner about halfway through the series, so they started making up increasingly convoluted ways to tie it all together, eventually winding up, as far as I can tell, somewhere in the Dr. Who universe.
Is is it possible to jump in in season 3 when it starts getting good, or do you have to drag yourself though the first two seasons to get what's happening?
I wouldn't advise doing that because you would enjoy the later seasons much less without having developed some kind of attachment to the characters, and missing some of the backstory.
But if you really want to do that, you could surely find some plot summary of the first seasons to quickly get the main "facts".
Ugh, and please let's not judge Star Trek TNG on its first season. Yikes!