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TV in the 20s
Jun. 22nd, 2020 10:22 pmThere was a thing that went by on Reddit or Twitter recently that said something like Netflix had saved the average viewer something like 56 hours of ads over the duration of the lockdown. Now I've gone to look up whether I remember that at all right I see they were touting that the saved US average viewers over a week of ads in 2019, with Joe.ie putting the figure at about 6 days here in Ireland. Whether this is all just hand wavey numbers voodoo or not doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, I am certainly not touting it as anything remotely like gospel, but it served to make me have a bit of a think about tv consumption and advertising.
We don't use our TV as a TV anymore, we haven't for years. I never signed us up for a Sky package or anything when I bought the house, the lads used to watch the stuff for kids on RTE that they liked and other times screens were a thing there was Xbox'ing or platystation'ing or the Wii. I never really felt there was a show I could commit to being in front of my screen at a definite time every week. If ad breaks came on and I didn't get back from getting up to do something in another room or whatever it didn't really bother me for most things. The more ad breaks there were, particularly where there were lots of repetitions of the same ads, the more likely it was that I disengaged. I notice it far more now when I go to visit other people and they have a TV on for background noise and there seems to be these endless streams of sponsorship ads, ads about TV programs on the same channel and they're exactly the same line up of ads that were played 10 minutes before. I have no doubt they are effective in their way, I certainly know more about UK sofa dealers and insurance companies than I ever, ever wanted. But I hate them.
I know most people traditionally used the ad break to go make themselves some tea, or the TV was just background noise anyway. Even I can't drink as much tea as I could make in an average set of ad breaks now I think. If I watch TV I want to actually watch the TV. I dislike sharing a room with a TV that is playing while people are doing something else. I remember realising that ads were played at an increased volume in comparison to the level of the show and that it increased the feeling of fracturing.
Then along came box sets. I could watch something from beginning to end with no interruption. I discovered that for some stories this made me reach the state of concentration that I prefer and that I really, really enjoy binge watching a series that particularly grabs my attention. I presume this happened for a lot of people and the already marked shift towards providing story arcs instead of instances of a repeated episodic formula has just gotten stronger. I find it interesting, for example,that I watched a lot of ST TNG and ST DS9 but would regularly miss episodes and cames away with a much stronger and more complex idea of the Klingon related stories than my much later episode by episode, watch everything (though not binge) repeat views on Netflix revealed. I presume my brain supplied story elements the series did not. I reasonably often find I have times in my life that enable a prolonged period of watching a series - illness for example. I have thus enjoyed bursts of watching things like Stargate and the spinoffs and I found it amusing to start to pick out the formula and how the same scenery was used in different ways. Watching Hercule Poirot revealed how few Art Deco places still remain for the BBC to be able to stage things in but how amazing set designers can be at their job. I like the layers of being entertained; the story and the craft.
The best TV makes me forget about the structure and get lost in the story, and that's where I binge, where I find myself wondering at 3 am if Netflix still does the "Are you still watching" check between episodes or have I just kept clicking next episode. Sometimes Prime will jar me out of a good binge because it insists on those stupid show ads before each episode. A series that makes me want to binge properly doesn't happen often, but when they do they plug straight into my brain and I adore the lost in someone else's brain feeling.
I've been trying to identify what it is that makes something more compulsive than another and I don't think I can. Sometimes it's that I really, really need to know what happens to one or more of the plot lines. Sometimes it's because I form a theory about something and feel compelled to see if I'm right. Sometimes a character hits me just so and I can't get enough of them for a while. Sometimes it's the world or landscape the whole thing is set in. Currently I have been enthralled with The Magicians, and I'm pretty sure it's for the world more than any other element. I love that it ransacks every comfortable magical place in my reader's memory and turns me around in it to pay attention to the gorgeous and the grey and the terrible. I adored and binged Heroes (season one - a distinction I was amused to note Prime is at pains to point out) for the characters, I needed to know what happened to them. I was gutted by Season 2. Cloak and dagger poked things in my brain and I wanted to let it keep doing so, it seemed to be a useful direction to be poked in. My brain prefers to explore things in huge chunks, not tiny bite sizes. Travellers communicated a compulsive urgency that I got caught up in, I think the first season was the first time I ever watched a show all night because I couldn't stop watching it.
I was trying to think of a ranking for "must watch binge series" but the reasons for the binge likely were a product of the right conjunction of time and place, interest and my brain chemistry so I don't think I have a list like that right now, but I'll give it some thought. I probably need to spend some time remembering all the shows I actually ended up binge watching first.
We don't use our TV as a TV anymore, we haven't for years. I never signed us up for a Sky package or anything when I bought the house, the lads used to watch the stuff for kids on RTE that they liked and other times screens were a thing there was Xbox'ing or platystation'ing or the Wii. I never really felt there was a show I could commit to being in front of my screen at a definite time every week. If ad breaks came on and I didn't get back from getting up to do something in another room or whatever it didn't really bother me for most things. The more ad breaks there were, particularly where there were lots of repetitions of the same ads, the more likely it was that I disengaged. I notice it far more now when I go to visit other people and they have a TV on for background noise and there seems to be these endless streams of sponsorship ads, ads about TV programs on the same channel and they're exactly the same line up of ads that were played 10 minutes before. I have no doubt they are effective in their way, I certainly know more about UK sofa dealers and insurance companies than I ever, ever wanted. But I hate them.
I know most people traditionally used the ad break to go make themselves some tea, or the TV was just background noise anyway. Even I can't drink as much tea as I could make in an average set of ad breaks now I think. If I watch TV I want to actually watch the TV. I dislike sharing a room with a TV that is playing while people are doing something else. I remember realising that ads were played at an increased volume in comparison to the level of the show and that it increased the feeling of fracturing.
Then along came box sets. I could watch something from beginning to end with no interruption. I discovered that for some stories this made me reach the state of concentration that I prefer and that I really, really enjoy binge watching a series that particularly grabs my attention. I presume this happened for a lot of people and the already marked shift towards providing story arcs instead of instances of a repeated episodic formula has just gotten stronger. I find it interesting, for example,that I watched a lot of ST TNG and ST DS9 but would regularly miss episodes and cames away with a much stronger and more complex idea of the Klingon related stories than my much later episode by episode, watch everything (though not binge) repeat views on Netflix revealed. I presume my brain supplied story elements the series did not. I reasonably often find I have times in my life that enable a prolonged period of watching a series - illness for example. I have thus enjoyed bursts of watching things like Stargate and the spinoffs and I found it amusing to start to pick out the formula and how the same scenery was used in different ways. Watching Hercule Poirot revealed how few Art Deco places still remain for the BBC to be able to stage things in but how amazing set designers can be at their job. I like the layers of being entertained; the story and the craft.
The best TV makes me forget about the structure and get lost in the story, and that's where I binge, where I find myself wondering at 3 am if Netflix still does the "Are you still watching" check between episodes or have I just kept clicking next episode. Sometimes Prime will jar me out of a good binge because it insists on those stupid show ads before each episode. A series that makes me want to binge properly doesn't happen often, but when they do they plug straight into my brain and I adore the lost in someone else's brain feeling.
I've been trying to identify what it is that makes something more compulsive than another and I don't think I can. Sometimes it's that I really, really need to know what happens to one or more of the plot lines. Sometimes it's because I form a theory about something and feel compelled to see if I'm right. Sometimes a character hits me just so and I can't get enough of them for a while. Sometimes it's the world or landscape the whole thing is set in. Currently I have been enthralled with The Magicians, and I'm pretty sure it's for the world more than any other element. I love that it ransacks every comfortable magical place in my reader's memory and turns me around in it to pay attention to the gorgeous and the grey and the terrible. I adored and binged Heroes (season one - a distinction I was amused to note Prime is at pains to point out) for the characters, I needed to know what happened to them. I was gutted by Season 2. Cloak and dagger poked things in my brain and I wanted to let it keep doing so, it seemed to be a useful direction to be poked in. My brain prefers to explore things in huge chunks, not tiny bite sizes. Travellers communicated a compulsive urgency that I got caught up in, I think the first season was the first time I ever watched a show all night because I couldn't stop watching it.
I was trying to think of a ranking for "must watch binge series" but the reasons for the binge likely were a product of the right conjunction of time and place, interest and my brain chemistry so I don't think I have a list like that right now, but I'll give it some thought. I probably need to spend some time remembering all the shows I actually ended up binge watching first.
