Anyone who enjoys watching television to wind down knows the phrase “Are you still watching?” all too well. The message appears on a streaming service after hours of watching the same show, or as the world at large has coined it, “binge-watching.”
Streaming has allowed people to watch entire seasons of television in one sitting and absorb years’ worth of content in a day. The binge-watch has become a global pastime, and so has discussing those shows online. Over time, both intense fans and haters have cropped up on the internet, with some shows being more fervently hated than others. The average social media user has almost certainly run into droves of comment sections that despise “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Friends,” for instance. But are these shows, which were incredibly popular during their time, really the hard watches everyone says they are, or are they just products of their era?
Before streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and HBO were commonly subscribed to, people watched television by subscribing to cable TV, tuning into broadcast channels, or through DVDs. When a new season of a TV show came out, episodes would air one week at a time, and viewers would make it a habit to spend one evening per week with their favorite characters. An activity that currently takes up one weekend used to take months. Viewers also made sure to give shows their full attention, as being able to rewatch the same episode later wasn’t nearly as easy and accessible as it is now.
When analyzing the plotlines of older shows from this lens, it’s easy to see that what viewers today find frustrating to watch would’ve made sense for the way pacing worked when the show was aired. Take “Grey’s Anatomy,” for example, which first came out in 2005. Meredith and Derek’s will-they-won’t-they has been discussed extensively online, with most agreeing that the constant back and forth between the two made, as one user put it, “Mer look desperate and Derek look like a dog.” However, the relationship between the characters would’ve been far less confusing to someone who was watching one episode at a time instead of five or six, as the viewers wouldn’t have been tasked with remembering too much information at once. In the second season of “Gilmore Girls,” which ran from 2000 to 2007, Rory’s love triangle with her ex-boyfriend, Dean, and her newly introduced love interest, Jess, is widely considered hard to keep up with. But for a viewer in the early 2000s, the complicated plotline would have provided exactly enough drama for it to remain interesting over the course of a year. Clearly, a closer look at why these choices were made reveals that the real problem isn’t an unlikeable character or poor writing but the increased normalization of binge-watching.
There are still TV shows that release episodically or on a schedule where only a few episodes of a season are launched at a time, and they tend to hold up for much longer after initially airing. One example of this is Netflix’s “Arcane.” Both seasons of the show were made available in three installments, or “acts,” spaced a week apart, and it was Netflix’s most popular show in 60 countries. This is one solution that studios have found to the problems that the modern era of television presents, as they’re able to continue writing longer seasons with dynamic plotlines.
However, this isn’t the case for the majority of shows today. Shows where seasons are put out as a whole are written, directed, and produced with streaming services specifically in mind, along with the fast-paced viewing habits of those who watch them. While appealing to the audience’s preferences and adapting to a new technological environment may seem like a positive direction on the surface, the consequences for the content’s quality largely go unnoticed. Multiple screenwriters for Netflix have reported that executives are asking them to make sure characters narrate the on-screen action so that viewers who are scrolling on their phones at the same time are able to follow along. It’s become increasingly common for series to only contain around 10 episodes per season when that number used to be closer to 21, and they don’t tend to run for longer than two to three seasons anymore. Television is adapting to the shortening of people’s attention spans, and as a result, it’s become a vicious cycle that removes the need to pay attention at all.
So, when watching a show, especially one that was aired in the era of cable and DVDs, consider pacing yourself. The urge to binge a whole season at once is understandable, but you may be ruining your viewing experience — and the future of television.
