Once is (Not) Enough

Special Installment: Good Friday
If you love movies, you may agree that there are some movies, although excellent, you never want to see again.

If you have cable TV, you know that on any given day that you flip through the myriad channels you're going to find another rerun of The Shawshank Redemption on a movie channel somewhere. It's on -- like -- ALL the time, and, according to The Wall Street Journal, that assumption is fairly accurate.

TSR accounted for 151 hours of cable airtime in 2013. This means you had a pretty good chance of landing on this brutal but uplifting story about an innocent man beating the cruelty and evil of a mid-20th-century prison and escaping to freedom. No matter where we click into the story, we're likely to take some time to watch it, because it's that good, even though it lost out to Forrest Gump in the 1995 Academy Awards -- a movie that isn't on TV quite as often, but still a lot.

"Mere exposure effect." This is the scientific expression that explains why we watch again and again Tim Robbins' character Andy Dufresne burst through that disgusting sewer pipe during his escape from Shawshank. It's...