How We Disrupted the Fun Out of TV

For people who cover TV for a living, handling the absence of Game of Thrones this year was like getting used to a crater in the front yard. (The shows final season was split in two; 2017 saw the first half, and 2019 will see the second.) Thrones is a tentpole show—something that unites critics, fans, and even casual watchers under the same umbrella. My industry has built an entire business model around explaining, recapping, or simply just enjoying these kinds of shows, a lineage thats also included Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, and The Wire. You may notice, though, that none of those examples are airing anymore. And while Game of Thrones is probably the biggest tentpole of all, it also might be the last tentpole.

Blame that oft-invoked phrase, “Peak TV”—or perhaps “Too Much TV.” There are certainly hundreds more scripted shows available right now than ever before, in total indifference to the limited number of hours I can shove content into my eyeballs. My colleague Joy Presss survey of the coming streaming wars breaks down precisely how critical the situation is getting; read it, but keep a brown paper bag nearby in case you need to hyperventilate. (Maybe thats just me.)

And thats just the tip of the TV iceberg. Theres also vast libraries of unscripted content—cooking shows, reality competitions, travel programs, and the really, really big subsection of television that is professional sports. Theres 24-hour news—several different versions of it, in fact. There are content libraries that are entirely dedicated to films (or there were: R.I.P., FilmStruck). And, of course, there the thousands (millions!) of hours of usually amateur but often extremely entertaining video from users on platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and Instagram.

Typically, the difference between the TV-that-was and the TV-that-is is framed as a quantifiable one: the new TV options cost less than the old ones (for now). The new TV options offer more things to watch.

But really, the issue is how these voluminous options are structured and accessed. To put it another way: There are a lot of books in the world, but were not all having panic attacks every time we walk into a Barnes & Noble. It might be terrifying, though, if the books were all taken off the shelves, jumbled into various featureless bins, and carted off to different buildings that all cost different amounts of money to enter. That is whats been happening to TV, as weve progressed from three rinky-dink broadcast channels to literally countless avenues for content.

As a result, searching for TV has become a huge part of the viewing experience—and watching has gone from a passive to an active pursuit. Most of us, most of the time, choose to watch a specific title—at a time and pace we also decide. Due to sheer volume (and, to be honest, mediocre in-app discovery), “just browsing” is an overwhelming experience, punctuated by knowledge that you could scroll through a database forever without truly reaching the end.

In some ways, this is a good thing. The mindless drone of TV as background noise is one of the reasons the medium was once christened “the idiot box”; the era of conscious viewing spurred the resurgence of TV as a critically lauded medium. Thats fun for everyone—especially people like me, who make a living telling other people what they should watch next.

But as this viewing model has become the norm—as distribution increasingly takes the form of a database or a library rather than a channel or stream—its significantly reduced the number of shows that everyones watching at approximately the same time. (If you look at same-day ratings, youll see just how catastrophic this reduction has been.) And when whole seasons drop all at once, its rare for any premiere to get more than week of media coverage. Its even harder for any of those debuts to build up the word-of-mouth head of steam necessary to excite viewers at home. Netflix has worked very hard to perfect its algorithms, which target specific “taste clusters” of users. But based on how much money Netflix and Amazon pour into PR campaigns for their shows—including a huge injection of cash into awards PR, in particular—it seems that these streaming giants have found even their formulas have limitations.

Even so, practically every major TV distributor now has its own online streaming service with exclusive content—be it CBS All Access, Showtime Anytime, Sony Crackle, the Comedy Central app, HBO Now, or a partnership with Hulu. Disney+, the much-heralded Disney streaming service, is set to launch in 2019, and has set its sights on competing directly with Netflix. (Apple has also announced a full slate of original serial programming, albeit a much-delayed one.

Every one of these services, has a similar model: Find a niche of subscribers, and serve the hell out of them. Hulus invested in the back catalogs of beloved TV shows like ER, The Golden Girls and 30 Rock; Netflix, amidst catering to many other constituencies, has heavily expanded its Spanish-language programming to conquer the Latin American market; Philo offers cable TV without all those pesky sports channels; Acorn TV specializes entirely in British imports. There is even a portal exclusively for fans of The Simpsons, called Simpsons World, via FXs streaming service.

In other words, hyper-personalization is key—a strategy that locks viewers into silos. To some extent, TV has been doing this forever—"Its not TV, its HBO”—but the traditional broadcast/cable model also gave viewers freedom to switch between a variety of niche channels. The more that people watch only the silos theyve opted into—due to interest, or cost, or whatever—the more fragmented our conversation about TV will be.

And that does, in fact, fundamentally alter the DNA of television. Engaging with a show in real-time creates a unique sort of long-term relationships, and has also historically made TV something rare and beautiful: a mainstream, responsive narrative form. When viewers dont like a plot twist or a character on a show thats being created as it airs, writers have a chance to change course. Sometimes thats bad—like when Leah Remini supplanted Erinn Hayes as Kevin Jamess wife on Kevin Can Wait—and sometimes its great, like when Game of Thrones consciously adjusted how it presented its female characters nudity and sexual experiences. And of course, theres little else that matches the power and joy of responding to live television—from live-streamed Beychella to HBO's Game of Thrones to the broadcast ratings juggernaut the Super Bowl, which captivates even the football-agnostic among us.

The relationship between you and everyone else silently lit by the blue glow of the screen has been, in the short history of the medium, a fundamental element of the televisual experience. TV's recent innovations have severed this connection. And though there are significant social and political conclusions to be drawn from this—about the accessibility of art and the fragmentation of the American audience—what I feel, mainly, is that some of the joy of TV has been leached away.

As a result, Ive been unwinding lately by immersing myself in the banal joy of channel-surfing. I may never watch the original run of Will & Grace all the way through, but when TBS airs a random episode or two on a quiet evening, Im very likely to commit. (Who wants to talk about Matt Damons guest appearance? My take: Weird!)

Cable is not, exactly, the technology that I think will save us. But as this televised upheaval continues, its worth remembering that the TV experience is not only about putting content into your face. Its also about stumbling into a rabbit hole of QVC programming, of tuning into Wreck-It Ralph halfway through to see if you like it enough to bother watching from the beginning. Of being interrupted by a news alert if theres a thunderstorm on the way. Watching Netflix or Hulu, I miss the bizarre local commercials that populate regular TV—ads for car dealerships and insurance policies. They make me wonder who my neighbors are, and in an odd way, they connect us.The fun thing about TV wasnt simply that it showed us something entertaining, or funny, or beautiful, or deep. It was that the box brought you closer to everyone.

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