The Community Building Power of Weekly TV
As an older Gen Z (one born in the “late 1900s” as my younger comrades remind me) and an avid consumer of television, I’ve had the unique experience of participating in television fandom before, during, and after the rise of Netflix and the “bingeable” series.
My first memory of creating community around a television show is when I was ten years old and a handful of my friends became inexplicably devoted to Ghost Whisperer and The Ellen Show. These shows were on every day after school and the next morning we would dissect the highlights of the episode.
At that point, we were less concerned about the plot than we were about being invested in something. The show itself was a vessel that allowed the earnest connection of elementary school friendship to stretch out across the city after our post-school bell goodbyes. It could have been any show, as long as it gave us some influence on each other’s lives outside of school and something to bond over the next day.
In middle school, I started watching Glee. After watching the first season on DVD, I became one of the 10 million weekly viewers in 2010. Once I discovered one of my closest friends (and crush at the time) watched Glee weekly - her favourite character being Blaine and mine being Kurt, of course - Tuesday became the most exciting day of the week. I had a ritual set up at home and would make sure to be sitting on the couch at 7:55 on the dot so I didn’t miss a single second of the musical chaos.
Wednesday was bittersweet. On one hand, I had to wait a WHOLE week for the next episode (sometimes longer if there was a mid-season hiatus) but I could gush with my crush about all the best Klaine moments from the night before. It was also the day they usually released the teaser trailer and song list for the next episode. We became amateur sleuths, trying to deduce the plotlines from the tracks they released.
In high school, I made my first friend when she saw me eating out of my Glee-branded lunch bag alone and invited me to join her for lunch. Our friendship was built on further dissections of television, starting with Glee and slowly transitioning into the Superwholock trifecta. However, at this point, weekly TV was on its way out and streaming websites were on the rise.
The summer after grade nine, Netflix released its second original series, Orange is the New Black, which spread like wildfire through my arts high school (unsurprisingly, given our particularly queer and female student body). It seemed like everyone had watched it over the summer, and I was eager to consume the series in one gulp so I could participate in the gossip.
I spent hours a day watching television in my room, not only as a form of escapism from high school stressors but also so that I could discuss shows more thoroughly with my friends who were already a season or two ahead. I resisted joining online communities until I had finished the hundreds of hours of television of long-running shows so I wouldn’t have anything spoiled. Although HBO still held audiences captive every week with shows like Game of Thrones, it seemed most people preferred to dedicate their media time to the immediate satisfaction of TV-binging in the mid to late 2010s.
Fast forward a couple of years and Netflix is slowly losing its grip on society while HBO has stepped in to become the driving force of TV once more. If you’ve been on Twitter after 9:00 PM on any Sunday (the prime slot for the television channel), your timeline is probably flooded with memes and hot takes in real time about the most popular show of the month. Unlike Netflix’s modus operandi, HBO has stuck to the weekly episode release schedule, instead of dumping a whole season of content online at once. HBO basically owns Sunday evenings, gifting us with a new episode of addictive shows such as White Lotus, The Last of Us, and Succession week after week.
Not to get too existential, but watching an episode of TV air live always draws my attention to the interconnected web of our lives and the electric excitement of cycling through emotions in tandem with thousands of people around the world. This giddy synchronicity mirrors the connection I had with my middle school friends watching Ghost Whisper after school, confident in the fact that we were experiencing something together despite being in different living rooms.
This connection extends beyond the screen time and social media updates, as the week between episodes is the perfect environment for speculation to fester and work its way through the community. Sometimes speculating with friends is even more fun than watching the show itself! Opinions and conspiracies of a shared show are also the perfect social lubricant in unfamiliar situations, a beacon to new friends from your fandom.
Recently I was invited to a watch party for the last episode of Succession, and I was immediately able to deep dive into my most unhinged theories with people I had never met before. The bond of sharing the unknown in such a low-stakes scenario created a magical tension in the room as our personal emotions collided together to ebb and flow with the unfurling plotline.
Though binge-watching TV is extremely addictive (seriously, at one point I bought a pin from Comic Con that said “Yeah, I Do Marathons” stylized like the Netflix logo), it is also a more individualized way of engaging with art. The joy of experiencing a synchronous story is lost when all the fans move at their own pace. Alternatively, fangirling over weekly television programs lends itself to connections with other people whether that is through Reddit threads, small talk at a party, or the evaporation of loneliness through participation in an evolving story alongside a large community.
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