On Not Jumping

The Future is SEXY

So: Peak TV. What a time to be alive. I’m old enough to remember when there was literally nothing on television. Nothing. You’d come home and have a choice between old Brady Bunch reruns and some awful afternoon talk show hosted by Morton Downey, Jr. or someone and after dinner you could watch literally some of the worst television ever made (literally) or sit in your room typing in BASIC programs from a magazine for six hours just to see a sprite of a rocket ship blip across your TV screen. That was Life Before, kids. No wonder any time a TV show that had anything at all resembling promise came along — an X Files or Twin Peaks — we collectively lost our shit. I recall watching the episode of Twin Peaks when Agent Cooper had the Dream Sequence and I nearly shit my pants because it was just so different from the dreck that was on TV at the time.

Of course, as a child, reruns of The Brady Bunch was just fine (also: reruns of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century with Gil Gerard, still my personal hero). What did I know? I still thought going outside and running in the street until I collapsed from exhaustion was a good way to spend my time. But here we are now living in Peak TV, a time when there are literally more good TV shows to watch than we have conscious hours in our lifetime. People view this as a blessing or a curse depending on their own particular TV-related traumas (and age; we’re moving into a time when kids will have grown up with nothing but Peak TV, and those fools will expect there to be a new Breaking Bad for them to watch every year).

The folks who think Peak TV is a curse tend t focus on the overwhelming nature of modern programming choice; it’s too much! Too many shows! These people are weak. The fact is, Peak TV has one basic benefit that is changing how we relate to programming that I personally am revelling in: We no longer have to jump.

Ribbit

By jump I mean we no longer have to watch a TV show the moment it comes out. Even in the age of ubiquitous VCRs or DVRs, ratings matter, and if a TV show doesn’t get eyeballs the soulless bastards who spent millions of dollars just to entertain your for an hour a week (and to sell your eyeballs, of course, for a profit) the show gets cancelled. Which can make people feel like they absolutely must tune into a show they love, and then launch a letter-writing campaign to stop it from being cancelled, and then launch a Kickstarter to fund a rogue extra season, and then spend their lives hand-sewing costumes for their fan version streamed on Youtube. There was a time, in short, when you had to immediately start watching stuff the moment it came on, or it would disappear.

And that’s the thing: Nothing disappears any more. Or at least, most things turn up somewhere these days, Netflix or Hulu or Youtube or Vimeo or Amazon. As long as there is some potential long-tail market for a show, it will be watchable for some small amount of money. And that means one simple thing: You can let time go by. You can let time and the hive mind assess a TV show for history, and decide you will only watch shows that have a 5-year Rotten Tomatoes score of 90 or higher. You can vow to only watch shows that have been recommended to you by at least 10 friends who each spent at least one hour passionately arguing with you about it. We no longer have to suffer through, say, the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. just because we hope and pray it gets better. We can wait that shit out and hop on later, when we are assured it gets good. Or at least watchable.

The End of Hype

If you didn’t experience TV before the Peak, this may not seem so incredible to you. But this shift is bringing TV (and to a lesser extent, films) into the same mechanism as, say, books: You can let history weed out the crap and concentrate solely on the truly great stuff. After all, you don’t care what the top 100-selling books of 1905. You only care about reading The House of Mirth because its continued presence at some level of the zeitgeist recommends it. Similarly, will anyone care about a TV like, say, Terriers? Right now it gets a lot of bubbling underground word of mouth. Will it in another 90 years?

This does mean that some perfectly acceptable and entertaining entertainments will be lost to history, more or less. Maybe even some of your favorites. After all, it isn’t easy to find episodes of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century these days. Is that a bad thing? Probably not.