You’ve been there, right?
The show that you’ve been waiting to see since the minute after last
week’s episode concluded is on. But you
can’t watch it. Maybe you’re struggling
through an uncomfortable family dinner or you had to work tonight. Or you’re out and having a decent time, but
you’re still partially wishing that you could watch the show instead.
And as you’re sneaking glances at your Twitter feed (or not
sneaking and just flat out staring at it), somebody has to talk about it. Whether it’s the show’s host/cast or a friend
unconcerned with whether you’ll now be able to fully enjoy your favorite
program, someone will spill the beans.
Personally, if I have to see someone’s spoiler for a show,
please don’t let it be anything fictional.
When it is, I still feel compelled to watch the whole episode but will
be thinking about the pre-revealed big event for the entirety. I know that there was no reason that I would
have to watch it at that point. But I
can’t help myself.
If you want to spoil something, go ahead and make it
something real. Tell me who won the
award for best actress (or whatever the applicable category is for the award
show of the moment). You’re awards
spoilers help me out. Then I can go out
into the world with the information that everyone else already has, and I can
have some form of conversation about it.
If there is a speech that I want/need to watch (“need” is debatable in
this sentence, I agree but “want” didn’t cover the “you have to watch it” phenomenon
of award show trainwrecks), I can go back and watch it without all the anxiety
about whether the individual that I’ve already decided should win (possibly
despite having avoided seeing the work of her competitors) does or whether the
most undeserving individual (yes this is totally just a judgmental opinion that
I likely hold without cause) takes home the prize. This is kind of the way to
do it.
Okay, now that I’ve been using award shows as my example,
you think I’m about to go all VMA’s on you.
I’m not. The same spoiler
struggle/benefit has to be dealt with if you don’t have access to the program
that you want to watch in your area. When
the British quiz show that I love is on in Britain, it’s early afternoon here. And
scrolling through my twitter feed I’ll find Victoria Coren (the host) talking
about her favorite clue of that episode of Only Connect or going on a
long run about how great that thing is that they mentioned in the last
question.
As a person who is missing out on the real-time experience,
I find myself reading live-tweets as they happen and going back to reference
them when I get around to watching the television event. When I watched this past week’s episode, I
knew that there were two questions which had caught the most attention on
social media. Had I been watching the
show at its air time, I would have had the opportunity to debate how it was
that one question had been deemed more entertaining than my favorite question
of the night. I would have discovered on
my own that the questions in the episode were difficult and not already decided
that when I saw fewer tweets bragging about getting a couple of answers than I
had the week before.
So here we are: questioning the relationship that we have
with television programming when the watercooler talk is real-time and
unavoidable. (Look at me closing with a “royal
we”. Unless you also missed you’re
favorite show tonight.)
