With television becoming the greatest addictions of our times, did platforms like Netflix kill the joy of snappy big-screen entertainment?
Petyr Baelish and Sansa Stark in a still from GoT Season 7
I don't know who invented alcohol/heroin/cocaine/tobacco/LSD. I do know of one Ted Sarandos, who came up with an addiction, which was so simple and obvious that, like God, if the download didn't exist, someone would've invented it anyway.
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Sarandos, co-founder of Netflix, originally a DVD rental library, used to love binge-watching the soap opera 'Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman', which would re-air on his TV on Sundays, over two and half hours flat. He mined that experience, I'm told, to come up with the idea of dumping all episodes of a TV show all at once on Netflix. What did this do to the state of the human civilization? Well, firstly, it turned the most common media myth of our times on its head-that people have low attention spans. It's the completely bunkum theory that forces everyone-publishers, journalists, filmmakers, and all sorts of story-tellers-to keep it short. Because people lose interest too soon, you see. No, they don't. The length of anything really doesn't matter. The content, whether it holds you or not, does.
I learnt this the hard way few years ago when I'd been invited for a fully-paid, weeklong junket to the Munich film festival, merely to participate at an hour-long panel discussion on one evening of the entire trip. I went in that afternoon to catch the Edgar Ramirez starrer Carlos (2010), after which, of course, I'd head to the panel discussion that the organisers had graciously spent so much to have me over for. Except, by the time I came out of the theatre, it was night. At no point did I realise I'd spent over five hours inside, watching Carlos, which no one had told me was a frickin' multi-part miniseries!
With the big screen, in a dark hall, where your eyes can't wander much, and the bucket seat is all you've got to manoeuvre your uncomfortable posterior, sure, you'd need a break after a while. That laboratory condition is also a reason we tend to be relatively harsher on our judgment on films that we watch at the cinemas-besides that we've to travel and pay for it. The same movie on TV at home hardly feels as terrible. And I've practically loved everything I've watched on a flight!
Even for a second, I don't want to think about what happens to humans when they park themselves in bed, with a laptop over the chest, and bags of chips strewn all over as Season 3 of a TV show has just wrapped up, and the quick countdown for the next episode starts. It's been six to seven hours already, sun's set, the room lights are still off, you're almost nearing midnight, and you stick around nonetheless to seek the answer to the most fundamental question of story-telling: What happens next! The red-eye then is no more a late-night flight, but someone pulling an all-nighter, binge-watching a bloody show!
Did platforms like Netflix kill the joy of snappy big-screen entertainment? Is it all that bad to slouch and lazily look straight, rather than sit and excitedly look up? To be fair, while the experience on a laptop/phone isn't immersive, the distance of the eye from the screen, whatever its size/dimension, is enough to captivate your senses. So you see footfalls in theatres falling, and Hollywood progressively dumbing down to catch that fall, because, you know, sequels, reboots, blast-fests, and multiple superheroes is all that there is to mass entertainment.
This, while the world patiently watches 20 hours of Narcos, about a Colombian drug-lord, without once noticing that all this while they'd been seamlessly catching a show altogether in Spanish, with English subtitles. Another age-old media myth broken-that people apparently don't enjoy subtitled foreign cinema; it's niche. Yeah, right.
Honestly, I've stayed away from the golden age of television for the most part. The reasons were first ethical, and now psychosomatic. Initially, you'd have to steal most good shows on torrent. Now that they're pretty much all there to be paid for, the only way to watch TV is to binge, since a great series, much like a fine novel, is simply unputdownable (the experiences are also somewhat similar, both being consumed in solitude). I know this binge behaviour is scary, from catching 13 hours straight of House Of Cards, almost without a break. Clearly I've an addictive personality.
Is the FOMO hard to resist then? Perhaps. You miss out on many pop-cultural references. You avoid a lot of conversations. You look away when Twitter and Facebook goes berserk over a revelation. You mentally shut yourself off when everyone and their mother discuss what they've been watching lately, and a laundry list follows. And sometimes, you just break that resolve. As I did, having just emerged from almost non-stop eight hours of Ozark. My fingers, metaphorically trembling, eventually touched on Season 1, Episode 1 of Game Of Thrones. Oh man, now I have 67 hours to go. Wish me luck!
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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