On Appointment Viewing
Streaming has been one of the biggest changes to how we consume media in my lifetime. I was born during the era of VHS tapes, I grew up at the dawn of DVDs, and I became a disgusting teenage gremlin right around the dawn of YouTube. The thing about all of these consumption methods is that you weren’t usually watching any new traditional media. You could watch Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift as many times as you wanted, but you couldn’t watch Fast Five at home. You could watch grainy bootlegged episodes of The Simpsons on YouTube, but you couldn’t watch new episodes of Bob’s Burgers whenever you wanted.
Then, everything changed (for better and for worse). Sure, it’s pretty great to be able to stream any episode of almost any TV show you’ve ever loved. And sure, it’s pretty awesome to be able to catch up on the episodes of the latest hit show that you’ve missed without having to plant your TV on Fox for a week and hope they run old episodes of 24…but what we’ve lost, for the most part, is the joy of appointment viewing (and also residuals for writers… check out this Vanity Fair article about the ongoing negotiations and potential strike)!
Besides the few examples of an HBO show blasting off into the collective consciousness like Game of Thrones, Succession, or The Last of Us, we mostly just watch whatever we want, whenever we want. I was too young for the heyday of true appointment viewing, where if you wanted to be a cool, hip, and in-the-know person, you had to spend your Thursday night watching CBS or some boomer channel like that.
It’s not all bad that we’re living in a new era now. Instead of everybody talking about that new episode of Frazier or (god forbid) King of Queens, you get to ask people what they’re watching and hear a virtual cornucopia of answers. A drama about a post-apocalyptic band, a documentary about the most incredible athlete that you’ve never heard of, or maybe a Netflix show about trying to find the single fittest person in South Korea. The days of monoculture have gone the way of Ivory knick-knacks and the middle class…that is to say, almost completely destroyed.
We’ve gone from what used to be a tasting menu of entertainment, where a chef tells you exactly what you’re going to watch and when you’re going to watch it, to a Vegas-style buffet where you can try out a little taste of 1970s Star Trek, then sample this soup of Australian sitcoms that you’d never heard of, then finish it all off with a dessert of 10 new episodes of Netflix’s latest prestige-style show all blasted out of a cannon on to your plate at the same time.
So, while there’s a certain communal aspect of culture that we’ve left behind, we have more choice when it comes to entertainment than any humans in the history of the universe (I think…not sure what the internet was like a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away). I’ll take that trade any day…just pay writers a fair wage for it!
What about you? Do you miss the days of monoculture viewing or are you a fan of today’s staggering amount of options?
It is still all monocultural for me as I only speak one language and poorly at that! Thank God I don’t have to watch the channels with other languages! As a guy whose grip has traded baseball bats for softball bats and is now mostly handling a remote and trying to remember lines from the DUKE like “That’ll be the day” I like being able to dive in at a selected movie or series and then grab the next desired morsel. I like those Australian oddities and a lot of the Brits and Bollywood. Fortunately the weather is nice here and I can go to the balcony sometimes and watch people walking their dogs, cycling or surfing before re-aiming that little black box in my hand. 👊
I absolutely loved the millennial perspective of this piece, which did its job of reminding me what television viewing was like in my childhood. I am old enough to remember thinking that the only reason my parents had children was so my dad could sit in his Archie chair (years before All In The Family) and tell whichever one of us was in the room to walk over and turn the actual dial on the TV to change the channel to one of the very few options we had - CBS, ABC, NBC and Channel 18 on VHF (look it up). On a slow TV night during a muggy summer it could be exhausting.
And then came the first remote, which was slightly bigger than a pack of cigarettes (look it up) and basically consisted of an on/off button, an up/down channel button, and a volume button.
On the one hand, yes, with so few options you did have the shared community of shows that everyone watched and talked about, but if you weren't home when the show you loved aired, or your parents wanted to watch something lame on another channel, or you had homework, or you were grounded because you'd been caught with heroin or something, you were out of luck until, if you were lucky, you caught the episode you'd missed during summer reruns. And if you missed it then, you had missed it forever. Or until it went into syndication years later when you were either in college or in jail for that heroin thing.
Now, you can watch every show that's ever been on, pretty much anytime you want, plus Canadian curling! And you can pause them when it's time to call your mother, or your significant other wants to tell you about a fascinating article they just read online about the history of paprika. I'll take today.