I’m always at my happiest when I treat my exploration of culture as a project. Back in 2014, I set myself the goal of watching one new movie every single day; initially, I picked movies on random impulse as I was reminded of them (such as The Godfather or random Quentin Tarantino movies I hadn’t seen) before settling into creating lists. An early one was simply every single Martin Scorsese film I could find in chronological order of release, but my approach became more creative; I particularly enjoyed working my way through every single movie Quentin Tarantino was known to have referenced in his films that I could find, and I also ended up polling my social circle for people’s favourite movies.

After a couple of years of this, I switched to catching up on some prestige television of the 00’s – Deadwood, Carnivale, some cop show from FX, Justified – and to make it even more fun, I watched them in chronological order of setting, even mixing some of my old favourites into the mix to recontextualise them. This was one of my favourite watch projects, because it was like watching history itself evolve before my eyes. I was deeply amused to see how the events of Deadwood would have been futuristic science fiction to the characters of Blackadder The Third. One can also see the evolution of how women are treated this way; the prostitution of Deadwood echoing out into Carnivale and The Shield all the way up to Cowboy Bebop.

What have been some of your watch projects?