The Writing on the Wall About Watching Live TV
How The 100 Makes Their Show an Event and Why That Matters
You can go anywhere on the internet and read articles bemoaning the difficulty of herding TV audiences to watch TV when it airs these days. Everyone waits until it’s out on DVD or (better yet) on Netflix. Everyone has a DVR and if they don’t watch later, then certainly they start a few minutes late and fast forward through commercials (a killer for advertisers). We are the generation of Netflix and DVRs, we don’t want to be told to watch something at a certain time, we’ll watch when we’re good and ready. There’s plenty of think pieces by folks a lot smarter than me about how this has impacted ratings and changed drastically how we view TV. Even writing this I feel like I’m repeating such an old song, it’s hard to make it sound new and fresh.
The prediction, by and large, is that the era of watching TV live is over. That we should all just accept it and move on. Record it, release it online, and let people watch it when they’re ready. Maybe, if you’re like Hulu or the networks releasing full episodes on their own websites, and rely on advertiser dollars you’ll be sure to throw in some ads to monetize it all. If you’re more the Netflix and HBO route you charge up-front for the channel instead.
Whatever option you go with the writing is on the wall, they say, no one wants to watch TV live anymore.
Here’s the thing: that infamous “they”….they’re wrong.
The problem isn’t that we don’t want to watch TV live anymore. The problem is that now, when you use the word live, it has to mean more than “available only at this one, very limited time/place” because that’s no long true of episodes of TV.
To my generation, TV isn’t live anyway. TV is something you sit alone in your room watching with your headphones in any time you feel like it. That’s not live. That’s not an event. That’s a normal Tuesday night. I get the same experience watching an episode of The West Wing many years later on Netflix that I would have when it first aired. An episode of TV is available to me pretty much from the day after it airs to any time in the future, so if what you have to offer in your live event is something I can get the same experience of any time I choose, when it’s convenient to me and I don’t have to schedule other things around it…then you’re not offering me any reason to attend your live event. You’re not offering me much of a reason to clear my schedule during that time.
And let me tell you what, there are a lot of things demanding time in my schedule, and I assume I’m a fairly typical representation of most folks in my generation and younger. Besides work and/or school, I (and basically everyone I know of my generation) have one or two side projects to keep me connected to my life goals and evolving as a creative person. I have blogs and podcasts and films and books and comics, all online and off, that I like to keep up with. I have connections with people who live down the road and all over the world who I make time to talk to in person or online or by phone. I devote time to my social media, because some of my real, honest connections are through the webs of online relationships my generation is so adept at building. I am always studying and learning through the wealth of knowledge available online these days. My schedule is packed.
My overfull schedule doesn’t mean I won’t attend a live event that I am interested in, though. I go to concerts. I go to conferences. I love comic con, that’s a live event that takes days of my time and requires careful planning. I make time in my schedule for live events because they give me something I can’t get unless I do. And that is the big giant key, that is the actual writing on the wall. It’s not that we don’t want to watch live TV anymore. It’s that most TV isn’t great at being a live event.
A live event requires so much more than only doing something at a particular time/place. It involves community, it involves planning, it involves preparation, it involves an element of spontaneity that comes with a certain risk you have to accept, it involves a relationship between the audience and the people attending the live event. There are not a lot of people doing live TV right at this moment in time. In all the shows I’ve watched and loved there is only one that I make time, without fail, to watch live these days: The 100.
I love The 100 for a lot of reasons. The story is great, the characters arcs are stellar, it’s a post apocalyptic scifi romp with beautiful world building, asking hard questions and managing to keep an underlying tone of hope for humanity amidst the chaos. It’s all the things I love in a story. Then again, so is Orphan Black. So is Supergirl. So is How to Get Away With Murder. So are many other shows I keep up with. But only The 100 has performed the magic trick of ensuring I watch live every single week.
It’s not magic. It’s really not. It’s that watching The 100 every week is an Event with a capital E. How do they manage it? I’m not entirely sure, but here are some thoughts:
First and foremost, a live event is really an exercise in community. It involves more than one person getting together and doing something. That could be me and my friend going for ice cream or drinks. Or, in the case of TV, it could be fans getting on social media and talking or meeting up at someone’s house to watch.
The 100 though, takes this important piece a step further. Rather than relying on fans only to create space for community and relationship around the show (though they leave space for fans to do that, an important part of this) The 100 team (writers, producers, actors, props people, music people, SO MANY OF THEM) has made a massive effort to be present and accessible online, which creates an existing space with quality leadership (ideally, depends on your team, I suppose, but this team seems fairly adept at it) for new fans to step into and find connection and community. They make themselves available to answer questions from the fans, to talk about where things are in the process, to discuss their lives and their experiences and their journey making this show from the day-to-day to the behind the scenes to big announcements. Everyone is varyingly available, as schedules allow, and the fans, for the most part, get that I think. Some are more reserved, some spend a lot of time joking around with us, but by and large there is a big existing space, created by the people who make the show for fans to step into.
Besides the actors (actors always have social media, and are usually the face of any given show so I’m not going to get into that here) here are some really keen examples of the community builders and some things they do that seem to work really well:
- The 100 Writers Room: Maintains a Twitter and Tumblr and shares with us all the time about different things going on. Like script snippets after every episode so we can see where it began after watching it on screen. You’ll note, they don’t put out a ton of original content, they don’t need to they should be writing the show. But just seeing little bits of the story of their journey connects us to the tale they’re telling in fresh new ways.
- David J. Peterson: Created Trigedasleng, the language the Grounders use on The 100 (among many others for shows like Defiance and Game of Thrones). He has a tumblr and twitter and honestly is just so incredibly generous with his time and energy answering questions about Trigedasleng, they are chock full of great stuff. Beyond that, he’s a fan of the shows he works on, and participates like no other in the fandom.
- Kim Shumway: Maintains a Twitter account and live tweets during most episodes. She also takes huge amounts of time answering sometimes difficult questions like this one on Tumblr.
- Kira Snyder: Connects a lot of us to one another by re-sharing awesome fan stuff on Tumblr and Twitter, such a critical part of expanding and strengthening the community (and, side note, solely responsible for me discovering The Children of Tendu podcast and being really nice in answer to my outpouring of thanks in her Tumblr inbox).
- Javi Grillo-Marxuach: I’m personally a big fan of Javi’s and have been ever since I discovered The Children of Tendu podcast (which was a big shove in my slow turning toward TV as my medium of choice, if you want to work in Hollywood or especially write for TV I cannot recommend it highly enough). For The 100 he is his usual radical self on Twitter and Instagram, most notably some favorites are post-episode commentary doodles by Javi (that’s an example, he releases bunches of them after almost every episode, it’s great).
- Layne Morgan: I feel sort of weird how much I’ve followed along with Layne’s story, because I don’t actually know her, but knowing she was a fan who got the opportunity to work for a show she loved makes the fandom and the viewing of episodes and the online discussion with her and the rest of The 100 team feel like even more of a tight knit community. Not to mention, she’s been known to really have the back of the LGBT community and generally be a voice of reason in the fandom, which, let’s face it, often fandom is in real need of. Having someone in your sort of “community managers” who speaks the fandom language is so, so critical and Layne does it immensely well (though I wish she got a lot less flack for it from fandom in general. she’s a trooper, if you ask me).
- Jason Rothenberg: Is the showrunner, which you would never know by how patiently and kindly he engages with the fandom on Twitter. I joke that he has absolutely no chill, which to be honest I think is half of what makes this fandom so excited. He’s excited and it’s infectious (as I type this, he is apologizing for not getting the preview out earlier and promising it in the next few minutes…like he owes us something…really). He spends inordinate amounts of time answering questions and chatting back and forth with the fans on Twitter.
- Aaron Ginsberg: ALSO a big, big dog who you would never know was one by how genuinely nice he is to everyone in the fandom on Twitter. Also, he shares some of the best behind the scenes pictures any fandom could ask for.
This is a short list of all the folks who are engaged and some of the good stuff they’re doing. There are many, many, many, many more. Not to mention the actors, who generally are engaged on most shows anyway, because they tend to be the face of everything.
In addition to the time and energy and coordination it takes to do all this, there is the risk. Sometimes, especially when tweeting rapidly, things get said that are not entirely PR-friendly, sometimes fans get really aggressive or inappropriate, sometimes you tell people the sneak peek will be out a certain day and it takes until really late on that day to get it up (seriously, I’m still laughing about how nice Jason is, it’s amazing). When you engage fans, they start to feel like part of the process, and that can mean they start act entitled, they push hard for what they think they deserve. The more you put of yourself and your team and your creative process out into the world, the more there is for people to grab on to and judge or complain about. It is not for the faint of heart. Handling that with grace and aplomb (which I think The 100 team more than any other I have encountered has been really great at) is hard. Creating a community and fostering it so that every single week you can convince them to block off their schedule for an hour to spend time with you and your show is hard. But it’s important, because getting to know a little about these folks and their journey in this creative endeavor is the thing that convinces so many of us to block off that hour and be present with everyone. We get to experience this show with these awesome creators and with our fellow fans.
It’s what has made it a not-to-be-missed experience to watch episodes live, since as many people as are available from the team live tweet the episode, providing thoughtful commentary, engaging with and retweeting interesting things from fans, keeping #the100 trending even as they provide their own thoughts and work as connective tissue between fans who don’t know each other yet, all the while filling social media feeds of potential new viewers with thoughtful, engaging commentary as we all go nuts chit chatting with them and each other online.
As far as I can tell, from my not-at-all-knowing-anything-or-any-of-these-people vantage point, this charge was initially largely led by Jason Rothenberg and Aaron Ginsberg. Like so many things in creative endeavors and in entertainment, the tone is set by the top of the ticket. And Jason and Aaron were both immensely generous with their time and thoughts from the beginning and, from what I can tell, have supported and encouraged everyone working on the show to also be generous with their time and to get engaged with the fans. We have to assume that the network is also supportive of all this, which I know is not always the case. Like I said. This is hard. BUT…
…All of this has resulted in me personally as a fan getting more familiar with the teams involved in the creation of this show than any other show I watch (and I’m the kind of fan interested in the inner workings of the industry) and being totally committed to always making sure I have time to watch the episode live with them. We know before every episode airs who the writer is, because they remind us. We get to hear that writers thoughts, usually, as the episode airs, we get to hear about what was cut, we get to hear about inside jokes in the writers room. We get to sling 140 character compliments at Tree Adams because Jason reminds us that Tree was the person responsible for the awesome swelling music in that one scene that had your heart pounding. We get to raise a glass with Katie Stuart, who’s character was killed off this last episode, as she was live tweeting the experience with us. It’s like we get to be a small part, from our vantage point as viewers, of this journey that making something as massive as a TV show always is. And that… that’s magic.
Watching The 100 every week live is like getting together with some of the coolest, hardest working creatives and enjoying the fruits of their labors with them. And I will definitely clear time on my schedule for an hour each week for something as awesome as that.
