Watching Series in the Virtual Living Room
(dreaming about a spoiler-free Internet)
Serialised television is almost my favorite form of storytelling today. It’s not just about the way stories are told: it also has to do with how we digest them, devour them, and ultimately how we share this experience with others. Serialisation is embedded in our souls — we crave for new, while we need what we’re familiar with.
Indeed, thanks to the Internet, the shared experience of serialised storytelling has reached an unprecedented scale and maturity, generating what we might call the virtual living room. As a matter of fact, every single episode of any TV show can produce, on the web, a increasingly vast and intricate meta-layer of discussions, insightful observations, inside-jokes, discoveries of subtle links between any given episode and the previous ones, analyses of visual composition and story elements, puzzle solving to guess what might be next on the show, knee-jerk reactions to the more visceral aspect of the narratives and so on.
Picture what your brain does when you’re watching an episode of your favorite drama— the connection it makes, the thoughts that arises, the feelings you get — and multiply that by thousands or more.
When I logged in on Reddit during the last episodes of Breaking Bad, I was stunned by the amount of discussions that every moment of every episode was giving birth to — also a testament of the show’s greatness. Watching the show while gathering all of this information made my viewing experience transcend into something deeper and wider. Like many other people, and even hardcore fans, I had binge-watched the first seasons of the show, seeing many episodes a day on my laptop, alone. Watching the last batch of episodes at the time of their original broadcast, and jumping on Reddit and Twitter between one episode and the other, changed everything for me. I wasn’t just watching the show anymore, I was part of something.
I remember that after watching the episode Felina (Breaking Bad at its finest), I talked about it with a friend of mine (another fan of the show) who isn’t on Reddit, and who doesn’t even use Twitter that much. He was astonished by the amount internal and external references, hidden meanings and other tidbits about that episode I happened to know and understand. In that moment I realised that Reddit made me smarter, that ‘joining the conversation’ episode after episode made me a ‘better’, more aware viewer.
Yes, you can and should be able to experience and enjoy a filmmaking product just by itself, but this is art, and there’s so much more than what you get at first sight, whereas the Internet is that fantastic tool we have to access all those hidden layers by joining forces, and enjoying the process.
This happens to films as well, not just series. These days whenever I see a movie that is more complex and deep than the average Hollywood flick, I rely on long analysis and video reviews that often open my mind and make me appreciate the films even more. This happened, for instance, after viewing Chris Stuckmann’s video explanation of Only God Forgives, which made me realize that I didn’t get what the film was really about when I watched in the theater. While I still read critics reviews from time to time, it’s what other viewers are able to conceive that compels me.
Now, of course many people actually prefer binge-watching nevertheless, and I myself like to do it sometimes. But it doesn’t feel right that for some shows that’s the only possibility.
Netflix, indeed, has already killed the virtual living room for its viewers by releasing entire seasons of its shows in a day. Hence it’s nearly impossible to discuss episodes, themes, characters evolution, plot-twist and all the other stuff discussed above. The subreddit is there, the tweets are there, but it’s clearly not the same thing; the horizontal discussion is verticalized, the meta-layer is compressed, the collective brain is paralysed. Maybe I’m being dramatic for the sake of making a point, but I’m doing it for a reason.
There’s evidence showing that the online discussion around House of Cards, a show with its own volume of subtleties, is less substantial due to the way the show is delivered. As perfectly stated in this article:
The advantage of having full control is mixed with isolation. Previously what would be a community experience is now solitary: you watch the episodes you want on your schedule.
This is what an Amazon product manager thinks about Netflix’s strategy:
Netflix is trying to re-position itself as an Internet TV Network. They want you to think of them like you do HBO or Showtime — you pay a little extra each month on top of your basic cable bill to get access to extra content.
[…] releasing the full season on-demand helps differentiate Netflix from those other “linear” networks who are tied to a broadcast schedule. Netflix knows customers prefer not to have to wait between episodes. They’ve got more data on that than anyone else.
Netflix is not run by morons, and I wouldn’t ever suggest that they don’t know what they’re doing. The problem is exactly that they know what they’re doing, and that for many individuals this strategy probably works. But if we try to see the big picture, I think we can all agree that supporting individuals’ instant gratification isn’t always the right thing to do.
For the sake argument, let’s say that a supporter of binge-watching à la Netflix consciously prefers this way of experiencing his show; maybe what he doesn’t consciously know is that he’s subconsciously ever so slightly less affected by the show because instead of pervading months of his life, it vanishes in the arc of a few days, not having a chance to permeate his life the way it could. I’m not saying this is right or wrong or even that it’s what is really happening, but it’s something to think about.
I hope Netflix model doesn’t win and doesn’t become common practice. As a matter of fact, at the time of writing, I’m at episode 4 of season 3 of House of Cards, while many have already seen the whole thing. And the season came out less than a week ago. I’d love to read tweets about what I’ve just seen but there aren’t any, because everybody has his/her own pace. I read thoughts about the show in general, or the season in general, but that’s it. Sometimes some screengrabs end up in my timeline and I squint my eyes to dodge spoilers. I’d also love to visit Reddit and know what people are saying about the episode I’ve just seen, but I can’t do that without stumbling on screengrabs and GIFs of other episodes. That sucks.
I know I could mute #HouseofCards and go on with my life, but honestly I don’t want to mute anything. That’s the point of this post after all. I’m on the Internet and especially on Twitter exactly to join conversation, not to mute it. After watching this whole season of House of Cards, going on Reddit won’t mean joining the conversation, but just trying to pick up what’s left of it. It’s a compromise I’m fine with, like most people I guess, but I can’t help but imagine the alternative.
To conclude this rant on a positive note, here’s what I thought might kind-of-maybe-I-don’t-exaclty-know-how solve the problem: what if I were able to mute spoilers for House, of Cards season 3 episode 2 or later? Yes, you’ve read right. If people were able to meta-tag their posts, tweets and threads for how spoilerish they are, the problem (if we agree there is one) would be partially solved. You could set your “mute filters” not to erase the whole conversation about a show, but just the part that would hurt your viewer experience. If I’ve seen every episode of the show, but I’m writing about something that happened in season 2 episode 6, I could set my spoiler meta-tag at S02E06, and people who haven’t caught up yet wouldn’t see my contribution.
Simple, maybe, but not particularly ingenious and totally unrealistic — but writing is thinking out loud and sometimes dreaming about possibilities, so that’s exactly what I did. I hope someone will come up with a better solution though, so let me throw out there another couple of ideas: a separate social space with the kind of precautions discussed above already in place to safely and happily talk about television; an app or service that rewards people who meta-tag Reddit threads about series they watched, so that other users who are still catching up can filter those threads — maybe even a Chrome extension that embeds this kind of thing on Reddit itself.
Or maybe we’ll just start having other things to do instead of watching series (but that would be terrible) and start watching 1 or 2 episodes a week all together, and the world will live as one.
Now, please excuse me but I have to go watch episode 5, season 3 of House of Cards. Then I will discuss it with my girlfriend, who’s watching it with me, while desperately trying to ignore what the rest of the world is saying about later episodes, and being insanely curious about what they’re saying of previous ones.
Edit: here’s a related read I’ve stumbled upon after publishing my post.
