Back in 1997, the year Netflix was founded as a DVD-by-mail service, “Friends” and “Seinfeld” owned Thursday nights and we still knew our friends’ phone numbers by heart. The viewing habits and delivery mechanisms for how and what we watch have been drastically, almost unimaginably, rewritten since then.
And the commentariat has been sounding the death knell for appointment TV since at least 1999, when TiVo offered a mass-market solution for taking control of when you watched your shows, without the hassle of taping an individual episode on your VCR. DVRs have since become commonplace, and the death rattle has only grown louder as the traditional television market has been disrupted several times over by the internet, streaming services and cord-cutters.
But a decade or so into the new millennium, just as TV as we knew it should have been cratering, something crazy happened. Through a confluence of events — and really, really great shows — TV suddenly became the center of the creative universe in a way that it had rarely been before.
“I remember when Jonathan Gold said to me, ‘Nobody’s talking about food anymore. They’re all talking about television,’” McNamara recalled, placing the late food critic’s comment at roughly 2013.
The rise of social media and the second screens glued to our palms engineered a new kind of appointment TV, in which we could engage in live communal viewing even while alone on our respective couches. As individual shows like “Scandal”
pioneered cast-led live Twitter engagement, synchronous show tweeting became a thing (and spawned a veritable hellscape of meme-ified potential spoilers for any viewer who hadn’t tuned in yet). Suddenly, live viewing started to feel like an event again.
But Peak TV has also been drowning us in content. We’ve never had more shows or ways to watch them, and audiences are increasingly fragmented into fiefdoms of niche fandom.
Current
Los Angeles Times TV critic Lorraine Ali questioned whether “Game of Thrones” would be able to galvanize audiences in the same way if it started today. “It was a different landscape when it came on,” she said. “Would it be able to do it now? I don't know. There are so many good shows out there that we miss, simply because there is so much.”
Streaming services and the binge model have also fundamentally altered any idea of communal viewership.
“You can't have appointment viewing on a streaming service because nobody knows when anybody is watching it, or how much they're watching at any given time," McNamara explained.
So, was last night’s “Games of Thrones” finale really the end of appointment TV for good?
“I don’t want to say it’s the end of appointment TV, because it’s the end of appointment TV — until there’s another show like this,” McNamara said.
“Anytime anybody calls time of death on anything, I’m like, yeah, give it 20 minutes. But I think we’re not going to see this happen again anytime soon,” McNamara continued.
[Read Lorraine Ali’s review of the finale: “Game of Thrones” ends more with an exhale than a bang]And now,
here’s what’s happening across California:
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