#1 // On Lurchwatching
#1 // On Lurchwatching
We watched The Good Wife finale the day after it aired. That’s not quite correct. We started watching The Good Wife finale the day after it aired. Then we got tired, and we paused it about 35 minutes in so we could go to sleep. Then, the next day, we went back in and finished it. We’re not casual watchers of The Good Wife. We are fans of The Good Wife. We were excited about watching this episode even as we waited a full day to start it and then stopped in the middle. Having a baby has changed the way we watch TV quite a bit, but it’s not as if, before Maeve was born, our TV habits were pure, our streaming unbroken, our DVR unused thanks to the obsessive punctuality of our appointment viewing. I am not ashamed to have paused that slap.
This is how it goes, and this is how it went even before the baby, and this is how it is for many many people, I suspect. The archetypal viewer of the streaming era is the binge-watcher, guzzling six- to twelve-hour seasons over a weekend, viewing mediocre television products in a frenzy borne of boredom and tantalizing accessibility. I have been a binge-watcher, but it is not all I am. And, practically speaking, it’s almost impossible to imagine that this is the way a majority, or even a really significant minority, of people watch most of what they watch. The average number of episodes watched the weekend the first season of the famously binge-able House of Cards premiered on Netflix in 2014 was three. That’s one per night, for those of you keeping track at home. That’s not binging. It’s barely even social drinking.
Instead, we stop and start, we watch the first episode and forget to keep going, we lose interest, we dip back in during low periods. We watch three episodes, wait two months, watch four more, finish a month later. We aren’t dutifully serializing shows that are not dutifully serialized for us. We get distracted by other shows, by, you know, things that happen on earth. We’re watching on whim, and only sometimes—rarely now—does that whim lead us to true binging. We are, in other words, stutter-stepping through online series, lurching our way forward like student drivers. Lurchwatching is what we’re doing.
Yep, I’m calling this lurchwatching. I’m very sorry.
Some critics talk about this phenomenon as indebted to TV’s evolving form itself. The bagginess of the Netflix original series, or its lack of serial discipline, in other words, is to blame for this style of viewing. To some extent, I’m thieving this term from a line in the great Vox critic Todd VanDerWerff’s piece on this topic. He so so accurately describes the Netflix aesthetic as, “lumpy stories that lurch around and have bland midsections before closing with a bang.” This is a problem, but I don’t think it was created by these series, nor do I think it’s limited to them. (It's a pretty good description of the last couple seasons of The Good Wife, for what it's worth.) More importantly, I think it's less productive of lurchwatching than it is enabled by it. I was lurchwatching way before these series started lurching themselves, and I was doing it with series that are practically anti-lurch propaganda. TV doesn't need to lurch. I do.
In practice, the aesthetic VanDerWerff describes is bad news—as wonderful as Jessica Jones is, it is wonderful despite its tortured pacing—but we could also think about it as a rough draft of an approach that might actually eventually work. Series should—and do!—experiment with what forms are possible in different contexts. Premium cable writers learned how to structure episodes without commercial breaks, and online writers will likely learn better than they have so far how to structure series that can and will be watched at wildly different paces. (VanDerWerff, for his part, suggests that these series are structured like extra-long movies, though, as will become clear in a future installment of this newsletter, I'm not a big fan of describing one medium's innovation by way of another, different medium. #TVIsNotTheNewNovel) The breakneck hurry of a show like Catastrophe, despite originally airing on Channel 4 in the UK, makes it particularly well-suited to both binging and short, irregular bursts. But how else could series evolve? What if Game of Thrones premiered as one, undifferentiated, ten-hour chunk of video, and we could all move through it as we wished? What if House of Cards consisted of eight episodes dropped at once followed by a feature-length film a month later? What if nobody ever made another episode of Vinyl ever again? That last one doesn't really have anything to do with streaming aesthetics, but it's still a good idea.
Finally Started // Catastrophe (Amazon Prime) // S1, E6
I guess all it takes for me to get over how annoying it is to watch shows glitching and stalling-out on my TV—because Apple TV doesn’t have an Amazon app, and I have to mirror the stream from my laptop to the TV, and it sucks—is 18 months of critical acclaim, a profile by one of my favorite writers, and a glowing review by one of my favorite people. This show is just amazing, and so quick, and so hurtful, and so charming.
(Though, seriously, AppleTV, Amazon, figure it out. I don’t want, nor do I otherwise need, a Roku.)
Flagging // Outlander (Starz) // S2, E5
I realize, because the internet does not keep secrets, that some very *serious* things are happening on Outlander in the episodes that have aired since we have flagged on it, so I don’t want to be too cavalier about our momentary exasperation with it. But, as Bonnie Prince Charlie might say, MARK ME, if I have to watch another scene of Jamie Fraser playing chess, I am going to travel back in time to 2012, find Ron Moore, and sabotage his attempt to get Starz to fund this series. I'm done with France, and I don't know if I can stick around long enough for these two sexy goofballs to get back to Scotland.
Finally Finished // Transparent (Amazon Prime) // S2
Again, the minor inconvenience of AppleTV not having an Amazon app has proved to be the grain of sand in the microchip preventing me from hurriedly watching a television show I will obviously love. Most of everything’s already been said, but this season was especially interesting from a lurchwatching perspective. As best as I can reconstruct, I am pretty sure we watched this season in this way: E1-2, a week, E3-4, a week, E5-6, moved from Baton Rouge to St Louis, two weeks, E7-8, a day, E9-10. Which is sub-optimal in terms of the extraordinary atmospheric, swimming pool feel of this show. But the thing that was strangest about watching in this way was the way the Berlin flashback plot line weaved in and out of my experience of the series. It’s kind of teased in the opening episode, then disappears for a few episodes before returning, and then it escalates—in terms of time we’re spending with those characters—at the end. Binge-watched, I suspect this would have had a very distinctive flow, haunting the series, receding long enough to be forgotten before materializing again, the way that Gittel literally haunts Ali in the first episode. But lurched, those disappearances felt more jagged and less ethereal. Two months is a long stretch to hold that thread in the air if it's not checking in every episode. Likewise, five hours is not a terrific amount of time, and Jill Soloway really likes to use the shortness of her episodes to effect—as many episodes abruptly cut off as build rhythmically to crescendo. That economical approach also allows her to sprinkle things like the flashback sequences sparingly or wait so long to introduce Cherry Jones or Anjelica Huston’s characters. Architectural features can play more like grace notes or loving details, and, watching the way we did, I think it’s a part of the season I missed. Lost in the lurch. But I noticed, I guess, so maybe that’s something. A show this good, it's hard to see it the wrong way.
Recommendations //
In preparation for a piece that should be up somewhere shortly, I’m re-reading Michael Z. Newman’s wonderful short monograph, Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium (2014). It’s an illuminating and quick history of video as both an object, a medium, and a series of shifting euphemisms.
This isn’t precisely related to the theme of this newsletter, but Maggie Koerth-Baker’s “Tornado Town, USA” at FiveThirtyEight was just an extraordinary read—a humane look at tragedy and an essay that turns the quest for meaning in randomness into a kind of meteorological puzzler.
Ali Barthwell is the best Bachelorette recapper, and she’s back. (It should go without saying that I fully recommend the new season of Bachelorette, if only to prepare you for the return of UnREAL this summer.)
I, of course, really like Sarah Mesle and Aaron Bady on Game of Thrones, and Rachel Handler has a 30 Rock-level ratio of words to good jokes in her MTV News recaps.
You’ve probably already read or been told to read Amanda Hess on Asian-American actors and whitewashing, but, just in case.
Again, you’ve probably already read or been told to read Jacqui Shine’s gorgeous commencement address, and there’s a reason for that.
Oh, and it turns out this is a pretty good way to cook pork chops.
So. That's it for now. That's my newsletter. I'll have one of these every other week at least—more, hopefully. (I don't want to overpromise!) Feel free to respond, thanks for subscribing, enjoy the pork chops and the inconsistent viewing habits!
As usual,
Phil.