Peak subculture
Over the last few years, a few variations on the same thought have rambled through the television landscape: John Landgraf from FX said we had reached “peak TV”, the idea that there is now too much original content on television to possibly keep up with; Game of Thrones ended and was considered the last major show that a huge number of people would care about; and you and your friends started seeing things on Netflix that were in their fifth season and you would say, “What is this, I’ve never even heard of this and they’ve already done five seasons?” (Maybe that was just me.)
I think it’s gone as far as people feeling anxiety that they don’t watch everything, or feeling a need to “keep up” with what other people are watching.
I’m here to tell you that you can release that anxiety, because
It doesn’t matter
You can’t possibly keep up anyway, and most importantly
You’re already comfortable with this feeling in other contexts
What other contexts? Pretty much… every other form of recorded media. No one says “there’s too many good books I’ll never read them all”. Or “there are too many good albums” or “the movie industry is making too many good movies”.
Or rather… maybe someone who loves these forms does have that feeling… but there is no societal pressure on anyone to have “kept up” with every good novel that comes out in 2021. All I’m suggesting is that we apply the same idea to television.
For whatever reason, perhaps because of the mythical “water cooler talk”, TV has had this sense that it’s vital to a national conversation. Perhaps that has helped advertising rates, but it’s just not true anymore. The “water cooler” barely exists (except on Twitter), and post-Game of Thrones I don’t know that there is a “national conversation” that can be accessed. People simply have lots of different things they care about and really there isn’t a central hub for everyone to have an opinion anymore. Probably the biggest cultural artifact we can all argue about right now is politics (is it a coincidence that politics has become discussed and monetized more like sports?).
So we lose something there… we can’t just tune into Must See TV and talk with our friends on Friday about Seinfeld. But we gain a wealth of culture about way more specific things, not even examining the fact that the idea that Seinfeld was a universal experience was problematic to begin with.
We can be okay with not having seen everything (like I said, you already do it with almost everything else), and we can be okay that our culture is not the “default” culture. We can live without a dominant culture. Everything is a subculture. I think it’s healthy that there isn’t a “standard” setting and an “other” setting for what we watch on television.
Besides, the horse is out of the barn.
(Um, doesn’t the horse have to go back into the barn to sleep? Especially if it’s cold? Just leave the barn door open. Or is the metaphor really about the fact that the horse should have been in a stable, and it’s not about “don’t bother we can’t reverse what’s happened” but more about “everyone should sleep in the kind of home they want to sleep in”?)
Wait, I take this all back. If I could make everyone in the world watch Stath Lets Flats on HBOMax I would.