I agree, but I do see the value of anticipation and discussion among the members of a fan base. The thing is, we can have both if people are careful to warn of “spoilers” and fans who want to pace their viewing are disciplined enough not to access them.
The quality of office banter has certainly improved. Maybe next they’ll figure out how to squeeze an entire sports season into a weekend.
SenorBeef the point, contained within your op, is that television shows had already ceased to be the experienced at the same time communal experience for Americans. Dropping seasons of shows at once wasn’t even the nail in the coffin, the damn thing was already buried. There was a day when we all gathered round to watch the special annual presentation of The Wizard of Oz but they are long gone.
The exceptions exist but are few.
On the one hand, I made the same comment in the Saturday Morning Cartoon thread. Having everything available all the time is a good thing for viewing, but takes away the community aspect.
On the other hand, I don’t have any friends or acquaintances that watch the same shows I do, so I don’t have anyone to talk to about them anyway,
Agree with this viewpoint.
Having to set aside specific times to view something sounds too much like work, to me. I prefer to binge watch when I have the extra time, and waiting annoys me.
I also find that I am far more invested in the show when I get to take large doses when I can fit it in- I started The Blacklist after the 5th season was available on Netflix, and was hooked… but now waiting for each episode to drop for season 6, I find my interest flagging.
I wouldn’t call it progress; more like a lateral shift.
I guess my thinking is that while shows like Battlestar Galactica, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones are all events in their own right- both the beginning of new seasons, but each episode itself, nobody gets so wound up over the new episodes of GLOW or Orange is the New Black. Fine shows, both of them, but hard to discuss with people outside of your spouse/SO/buddy you watch it with, because you’re watching it at your own pace, and it’s hard for someone who watched all 6 seasons of OitNB a year ago in a set of extended weekend binges to recall what happened, if you’re halfway through season 4 and you’re watching it in 2 episode per weekend sets.
It’s great for watching the shows, but terrible for discussing them with others… so I guess I agree with the OP, even though I do like watching shows at my own pace.
I remember one of the seasons of OitNB had a thread that quickly went off the rails because there was a mid-season spoiler posted early on and I think it died from there.
Some of you are misunderstanding me and creating a false dichotomy. I’m not saying that we have to choose between broadcast, appointment television or streaming on demand television. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be able to binge watch an old show, or binge watch a current show to catch up to where it is now. The online streaming services having all shows available is fine and great, except for the one, specific instance of new original shows.
No show that Netflix (or as I think about it, Amazon prime also dumps whole seasons at once, right?) will become a sensation like Lost or Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. We will not all be united to watch it together, or discuss it at the same time. I proposed an example - Black Mirror is fantastic, and I think while it would never be as much of a huge experience as the previous three shows I mentioned (because it’s an anthology, and not telling an ongoing story, which is a critical part of creating a big communal experience these days), I think it would generate much more discussion and be more in the public consciousness if new episodes were aired one week at a time, when we were all discussing last week’s episode and speculating about next week’s episode together. Or Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings show may have had a chance to become a big thing that we were all watching together, but I suspect that if they just drop entire seasons of it at once, it will minimize its presence in the public consciousness, and scatter it’s public viewership, and inhibit a community from forming around it. Sure, we’ll have some discussion of it, but it’s not going to be anything like how we treated Lost or Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, even if it’s as good as those shows.
Hulu (IIRC) and CBS all-access have decided on a more traditional model with weekly releases for their new original shows. There’s nothing that keeps you from binging on the previous episodes to catch up, and in fact, the fact that you can do that will allow the audience to grow during a show’s run rather than become even more fragmented. And if you hate the idea of waiting a week for new episodes, there’s nothing to stop you from just waiting for them all to come out and binge watching them then. And there’s no reason you have to watch it live, exactly when it releases either. But it allows the possibility for shows to organically become communal again, when they gain the interest of the TV watching public, to be something that we’re all watching together.
So I’m not saying streaming is bad. I’m saying what Hulu/CBS all access are doing is better than what Netflix/Amazon are doing. I understand that the former two I mentioned are basically internet extensions of the cable/broadcast companies trying to modernize, and the latter two are two new entries into the market. And that’s probably why things as they are - Netflix and Amazon want to demonstrate that they’re a new thing and they don’t work like the old networks, whereas Hulu is basically the cable industry trying to modernize itself. And I’m not saying the new players don’t do it better - they generally do, and the old players are trying to copy them and adapt or die.
While Netflix is better than broadcast television in 98% of ways, there’s this one, specific way in which traditional broadcast television is better, and that I think the new players should resist “improving” on that particular thing by changing it. I think we’d be better off if Netflix and Amazon dropped new episodes one at a time for the original programming they create.
I agree (as I’ve said), and the issue is that by dumping entire seasons at once, the streaming services allow people to go at their own pace.
So if say… the third season of a show drops on May 1st, some people may have watched it all by May 2nd, and some may take longer than the equivalent broadcast season would have taken.
Which is all fine and good for one’s personal watching, but that wide spectrum of viewing speeds is a hindrance to discussing the show- what happens on say… August 14th? Some people will have binged the whole thing. Some may not have started yet. Some may have watched the first 4 and got side-tracked. Others may have watched 2/3 of the show. Or 1/3, or all but one episode.
There’s not that expectation that you’re caught up like there is with a weekly show, and that’s what acts against the whole shared experience phenomenon.
This.
My first thought was, and I mean no offense, but ‘that’s a nice story, Grandpa’.
The communal experience was mortally wounded the day Fox started broadcasting. It limped along but kept getting hit by new and frankly more interesting choices. Once the public had more choices, the community adapted and splintered. Then TV adapted further. For the better, IMO. For many of us were kept out of the community due that once a week format. If you had to work a different shift or had other responsibilities or couldn’t get clear reception.
Later, you could ‘almost’ be a member of the community if you had a VCR and the skills to program it, but the handwriting was on the wall. The nail in the coffin was cable.
How many millions of people all watched Game of Thrones last night? How many are discussing it now?
Yes, there are far fewer off these shows that brought everyone together like they used to, but there are a few.
But I think it’s unlikely that there will be a show released in the Netflix/Amazon style to reach this status. Their format is the actual nail in that coffin.
Entertainment Weekly said that the episode last night got 17.4 million viewers. That’s just in the US. They say that it had tens of millions more viewers worldwide. Netflix doesn’t really share its ratings, but I agree that it’s not getting that kind of numbers.
Even if they achieve those numbers in total, they’ll never have many people on the same episode at the same time, which I think is a key ingredient in becoming a cultural phenomenon.
Otherwise you get a lot of “hey man, did you see that Amazon LOTR series last night?”
“Yeah I binge watched 5 episodes. Wasn’t it amazing when…”
“Hold on, don’t tell me, I only watched the first episode”
House of Cards did well with the new format. It wasn’t GoT but then few things ever were.
Breaking Bad would never have become nearly so huge if people who started watching late couldn’t binge watch earlier seasons to catch up.
I much prefer the new way. I want to watch when I want to watch.
I like watching game of thrones, i like discussing game of thrones with like minded people, but the one and only reason i don’t wait until its over and then binge it is because there is a 100% chance it will be spoiled long before that. Ditto for Walking Dead when i still watched that.
I’m not sure if you’re just not reading my posts or what, but I’ve specifically said that being able to catch up with streaming old episodes actually increases the chance of the communal experience. I’m not against bingeing or streaming. I very specifically addressed this a few posts ago.
I read somewhere that How I Met Your Mother got big in part from new viewers going back to binge from the beginning. (That program is a bit unusual in that it’s a serialized sitcom.) And I think I’ve heard the same thing about other series.
Sorry. I obviously missed that.
No problem. Didn’t mean to sound bitchy if I did. It just seems like some people seemed to be responding to a “Netflix is bad” argument when I made a much more specific one.
I think this is another one of those nostalgiac “things were better in the old days” kind of ideas
Yeah there is less communal viewing now, but overall things are a lot better what with more variety of shows available, not having to schedule your life around TV, and etc.