The Final Decade of the Shared TV Experience, Part 1
Sonny Giuliano: Dalton, I know I was supposed to come up with something eloquent to lead-in this discussion about how the way we watch television has changed over the course of this last decade and how it will continue to change as we head into the 2020’s, but sometimes you have to lean on the information provided to you by others. So here I present to you the one nugget that I found in my research that I believe highlights this change in the function and importance of television more than anything else:
Most watched TV series episode of each decade
50’s: Ed Sullivan Show (Appearance by Elvis Presley) — 60 million viewers
60’s: The Fugitive (Series Finale) — 78 million viewers
70’s: Roots (Series Finale) — 100 million viewers
80’s: M*A*S*H (Series Finale) — 125 million viewers
90’s: Cheers (Series Finale) — 93 million viewers
00’s: Friends (Series Finale) — 52 million viewers
10’s: Undercover Boss (Series Premiere) — 42 million viewers
We’re about to close out a decade where the most watched episode of television was the premiere of an underwhelming reality TV program that pulled in under 6 million viewers per episode during its eighth season last summer. Now as I’m sure we’ll discuss, TV viewership numbers aren’t the be-all and end-all, but what people are watching and how many people watched does paint a somewhat accurate picture of what TV shows mattered, how TV viewing habits have changed, and what function TV has in our society. I mean seriously, look at that list one more time. The most watched TV episode of the 50’s through the 00’s makes perfect sense. Those programs all exist on some sort of era-specific Mount Rushmore. But Undercover Boss presents an all caps MAJOR change in the direction we’re going as TV consumers. It tells me that even though there were a handful of shows that were truly culturally relevant this decade, this is a phenomenon that probably won’t last.
Dalton Baggett: Sonny, your research on this issue blew my mind. That is a list of legitimate Mount Rushmore-esque shows, and then Undercover Boss. It’s kind of as if I taped a selfie to the actual Mount Rushmore. After reading those numbers, my theory is that older television viewers tend to pick a network and just stick with it, which could explain something as bland and uninteresting as an episode of Undercover Boss having the highest viewership of the decade.
Well, I did my own research and it turns out I was mostly right. However, it wasn’t just older cable viewers leaving their TV’s on a network, it was everyone. The 42 million-viewer premiere episode of Undercover Boss came on after Super Bowl 44, which had around 106 million viewers. That means that over half of the people watching the Super Bowl saw Undercover Boss come on and said “Nope, turn that shit off.” The rest of them were probably just too drunk to realize they had been sucked into watching mediocre television.
It’s also important to note that those 42 million were only a 32% share of all viewers, compared to something like M*A*S*H’s 77%. So maybe when you take the country as a whole, there really wasn’t anything shared this decade, and Friends was the last thing a majority of people were watching together. Or maybe we need to realize that, as you alluded to, these numbers are fairly arbitrary and the real judge of something’s cultural impact this decade are the conversations it spurs online.
SG: I think you nailed it with that last sentence, Dalton. Ya know how on Whose Line Is It Anyway, Drew Carey used to say, “the show where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter”? I get the impression that we’ve reached the point where TV viewership doesn’t really matter, especially when you compare it to the sizes of audiences 20 to 30 years ago. Viewership numbers and Nielsen Ratings are just two of the many factors that help to explain A) Why the amount of people who are watching the most-watched TV shows is steadily decreasing, B) How shows can remain culturally relevant even if their audiences are half the size of shows that existed 25 years ago, and C) Why the Shared TV Experience phenomenon still may come to an end sometime within the next decade.
But here’s something I’ve been wondering about since I started doing my research on this topic, and I want your take on it … do we maybe need to define what a “Shared TV Experience” actually is? Here’s the reason I ask: If you look at viewership numbers of shows in the 80’s and 90’s, even the most mediocre shows pulled in 20+ million viewers. As of 2018, no single show averaged that many viewers. But yet I assume there is more of a “Shared TV Experience” feel for This Is Us (17 million viewers per episode during the 2017–18 TV season) than there was Touched by an Angel (21 million viewers per episode exactly 20 years prior). Now it would be easy to suggest that this is a result of a strong social media presence, but if we go that route than we’re almost forced to concede that any show that existed before this decade didn’t have the Shared TV Experience vibe that we’re talking about here, and that of course is factually incorrect.
The problem is, I don’t think that there is any sort of criteria we can establish that would clearly lay out which shows qualify and which ones don’t. A show like Frasier, which won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series five consecutive years and was pulling in between 20 and 25 million viewers during it’s late-90’s peak, probably didn’t resonate the same way Friends and Seinfeld did, right? Again, this is just an assumption because I would’ve been like 5 years old at the time and only concerned with the NBA, NFL, WWF and Nickelodeon.
Maybe the easiest way to handle this is to just work our way through this last decade and figure out which shows qualify for what we’re talking about here. But in order to do that, I feel obligated to mention the first TV series that I remember creating a Shared TV Experience.
The first season of Survivor was unlike anything else on television. Not only was it the introduction of the Reality TV genre, it was peak Reality TV. I still remember being only 8 years old and talking with almost literally everybody I knew about what had happened on last week’s episode and who we thought was going to get voted out next week. One night, about halfway through the season, I went to my neighbor’s house to watch the episode with him and his family. They turned off the lights and made popcorn and we watched it like it was a movie. That’s the epitome of a Shared TV Experience. Naturally, I was one of the 125 million people who watched at least a part of the finale, but I imagine I was one of only maybe 1,000 who cried when Richard Hatch was named Sole Survivor.
DB: Here’s an embarrassing story about me. When I was a kid I used to watch Cheers and Frasier reruns before bed religiously. Cheers is one of my favorite shows of all time, yet I had no idea that the Frasier from that show was the same one in the show Frasier. I guess I thought it was the world’s weirdest coincidence? This ignorance lasted until college when I started re-visiting the shows. 8 year old Dalton was an idiot.
About your beloved Survivor, I’ve never actually watched one second of that show in my life. I can’t relate to that shared experience. I did, however, pretend to be really into it once to fit in at summer camp. Everyone was super pumped to “play Survivor” which basically meant sitting in a circle on a platform in the middle of a lake and voting people off so that they had to jump in the water and swim back to land. There were definitely alligators in the water. Kids are cruel.
So, I may not have been talking about Survivor with my neighbors, but I distinctly remember the first show that was the sole talk of the lunch table in middle school. It pains me to say this, but my first real shared TV experience was… The Apprentice. (Ok no one is going to believe this but after I finished typing that a bat flew out of my computer and out the window). Literally everyone was doing Donald Trump impressions and “firing” other kids for anything and everything.”Yuuugeeee!!” we would yell at each other, bagged orange juice rocketing from our nostrils. Oh to be young and unaware of the horrors of the future. There is without a doubt some kind of direct line from those lunch room shenanigans that I’m sure were happening all over the country, to Donald Trump winning the election in 2016… (Fucking bats again).
Enough about terrible childhood naivety and the ghoul currently squatting in the White House. I want to talk about this decade. I want to talk about dragons, meth, house fires, Demogorgons, and smoke monsters.
Ok, I’m actually not a big expert on smoke monsters. Smoke babies? Now there’s a conversation. But unfortunately I only watched the first couple seasons of Lost. I remember a hatch? Maybe some numbers? Definitely a life-long crush on Evangeline Lilly. So on May 23rd, 2010 when everyone was watching the series finale of Lost I was fresh off graduation and I don’t know what I was doing, but it wasn’t watching Lost.
I’ve actually avoided spoilers for Lost this entire decade. I thought maybe there was a chance I could watch it one day and be the latest to the party someone has ever been, but there is just too much TV and not enough time left on this Earth. Please give me your thoughts on the Lost finale as a shared experience. Spoil away!
SG: Well Dalton, it sounds like you remember the truly important things about Lost, and that includes Evangeline Lilly, who was hitting 100 mph on the gun for six straight seasons of television. My goodness, what a run.
I actually didn’t watch Lost until 2013, when I binge-watched the hell out of it over a three-month span, including the ground-breaking 25-episode 1st Season in just 3 days (Maria was out of town, I was on Summer break from college, and basketball season was over so I had nothing else to watch) (Plus it was rainy for a few consecutive days, so it’s not like I could go outside and be active) (And ya know what, I don’t need to justify my viewing habits to anybody anyway) (And another thing, the first season of Lost was a fucking tour de force and anyone who appreciates great TV would binge-watch it all if they had the time to do so, which I did because of the lack of other TV options, and the girlfriend out of town, and the rain) (Okay, it wasn’t raining). Anyway, I missed the entire shared TV experience of it.
Lost was a show that was a big enough deal where even before social media really took off and became what it is today, you heard about it plenty during its run. Late night interviews, plenty of internet columns, and some truly dope TV spots ahead of the finale … even if you didn’t pay attention to the content, the Lost hype was sort of unavoidable, especially near the end when, even after their audience size had diminished considerably from its first couple of seasons, the finale (and the build-up to it) was still one of the watershed moments in recent TV history. Of course, Twitter existed in 2010 and there was no shortage of activity on the old-school messages boards heading into the finale, but I wasn’t on either at the time so I can’t speak to how active the Lost community was other than hearsay. Even still, I was well aware of the fact that the final season and the finale were considered, and this is putting it nicely, polarizing.
As I was finishing up my Lost binge in early October 2013, I spent a good amount of time wondering about how my viewing experience would’ve changed had I just watched the show from the beginning. I knew the reaction to the final season was overwhelmingly negative, but I didn’t necessarily feel the same way. Confusing? Sure, but really once you hit season 4 it started getting more difficult to follow. Not as good as the early seasons of Lost? Of course, but there was almost no way they were going to be able to keep up with the pace set in the first three seasons. But bad? Eh, I didn’t really see it that way, and the same goes for the finale. I didn’t hate the finale. Truthfully, considering how up and down the previous 16 episodes were, I actually thought The End was the highlight of the final season. And as for what really happened in the finale, well I’ll let someone a whole lot prettier than me (and someone who knows a lot more about Lost than I do) explain what went down …
Here’s what is interesting though: As I was finishing Lost, Breaking Bad was concluding it’s run on AMC, and the reaction to the final season of Breaking Bad was the internet equivalent of a circle-jerk. People fucking loved Breaking Bad. Like Lost, I didn’t watch Breaking Bad throughout its original run, but as I saw the incredible outpouring of support for those revered final eight episodes, I decided that BrBa needed to be the next show I binged. I also decided that the next time there was a landmark show heading toward its final season, I wasn’t going to miss out on it. Enter Game of Thrones.
Thrones was shaping up to be arguably the most popular TV program of the decade, and I knew with the final six episodes coming up I had to be a part of what I missed out on with Breaking Bad. Well, after binging 67 episodes in 50 days, it turns out the online reaction to the final season of Game of Thrones was the equivalent of what would’ve happened if Lost ended in 2019.
With all of that said, I have three questions for you:
1. Was the final season of Game of Thrones really that bad, or had people already soured on Thrones before the final season and I just missed it all because I wasn’t paying close enough attention to it?
2. Is it more likely that the Shared TV Experience will die because everyone on the internet is a moody prick so it’s now less fun to share the experience of a TV show with others than it used to be? Or rather, is it because it’s harder to have that sort of mutual interest with streaming services allowing people to watch shows at whatever pace they want?
3. Would it be smart for streaming services like Netflix to treat the final seasons of their original programs as if they were a Cable TV series? By this I mean, assuming a show has a great deal of buzz heading into their last season, should Netflix or Amazon or Hulu or whoever gets in the game consider releasing one episode each week?
DB: Funnily enough I also didn’t watch Breaking Bad during its original run, but when all of the hype about the last few episodes was going on I got interested and binged it. It also helped that a girl I was into wanted to watch the last 8 episodes with me, so I was pretty motivated. Though, I do think that I got to watch the last 3 episodes as they aired, and I’m glad I did because there probably won’t be another shared TV experience that ended as positively as BrBa did.
That brings me to your first question. Game of Thrones was arguably the highest acclaimed show of all time going into its final couple of seasons. It accomplished the rare feat of pleasing the casual viewer, as well as hardcore book nerds like myself. However, all of that acclaim started slipping during season 7 and the show became whatever the Super Saiyan version of polarizing is during its final season. So yes, it was starting to feel a little rushed in season 7, and people were definitely talking about it on Twitter, but nothing compared to what happened in season 8.
It’s hard for me to be totally unbiased here. I wanted nothing more than to love the final season, so when people started talking their shit, it sent me into a defensive stance so strong Patrick Beverley would be proud. I did everything I could to defend the show on Twitter like I was Jon Snow facing down a charging Bolton army. I couldn’t let the trolls soil this thing that I had devoted so much time and energy into loving.
After a great deal of introspection, though? The final season was kind of bad. It had a lot of great moments, of course. Arya killing the Night King, Arya being one of the few women on the show to actually decide who she would sleep with, Arya sailing away to find out “what’s west of Westeros.” Alright, So Arya had a lot of great moments. Overall, it just felt too rushed, and there wasn’t enough time for the character development needed to justify a lot of the decisions they made. Let me put it this way: If George ever finishes the books, on future re-watches I will probably skip the last two seasons and read the tomes instead.
So maybe it was bad, but was it as bad as Twitter trolls made it seem? It sure wasn’t, and that brings me to your next question. I think that the Shared Experience will die in large part because of, as you so eloquently put it, moody pricks. Twitter is letting the worst people’s voices penetrate the conversations we are all having online. We’re not allowed to love anything anymore, at least not publicly. Sure, it’s easy to just say “Ignore them, that’s why we have a mute button.” But there aren’t enough mute buttons in the Seven Kingdoms. It’s devastating when you go online with your heart on your sleeve for something and a troll stabs that heart with a “Well actually, here’s why that thing sucks!” For the foreseeable future all discourse is going to come down 50/50, no matter the quality of the content. Hell, we can’t even get people to agree the Earth is a globe. The internet has broken us.
Finally, my last answer to your essay prompts. Netflix has a very specific brand, and that brand is binging. Once they started creating original content, they built their company on the concept of “Netflix and Chill,” even if they didn’t coin the phrase. Netflix came along and succeeded precisely because they were different. So for their bottom line it is clearly beneficial to them to drop whole seasons of shows at a time, even if it’s bad for the cultural discourse.
That should probably wrap up part 1 of our thoughts on the Shared TV Experience. Unlike Netflix, we aren’t going to release all of our episodes at once. Tune in for Part 2 on Friday November 15th!
