First of all, for anyone with chiroptophobia (that’s fear of bats and your vocabulary lesson for the day) let me say that this post has nothing to do with bats. It’s about television, and about how television viewing has really changed in recent years.
I will be the first to admit that I am neither hip nor cool. I am the opposite of an early adopter. So, it was with some dismay that I learned this week that HBO Max (or Max or whatever I’m supposed to call them this week) decided not to renew the excellent series Winning Time. I only started watching this show a few weeks ago. Since I’m also not a binge-watcher, I’ve only seen the first 3 episodes. Here’s hoping that Max doesn’t yank the series from the platform before this slowpoke gets to watch the rest of the series.
Television has changed a LOT since I was a kid, in all sorts of ways. One big change is the all-around quality of programming. Production value, acting, writing it’s all light years beyond stuff that was being broadcast when I was a kid, and yet less people are watching shows. I mean, more people are viewing stuff overall, but individual series get a lot less eyeballs due to how fractured things have become and the sheer volume of stuff that’s out there to watch.
Ron, who goes to bed far later than I do, has been getting into some different old television series. Something he was thinking about while watching old episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore Show is how when that show originally aired people across the country were dutifully tuning in and watching it all at the same time, because this was literally the only way to watch the show.
When I was growing up, on Thursday night not everyone, but an extremely large portion of the country was watching The Cosby Show. If you missed it, then you would have to wait months for the re-run. In some cases a show would get cancelled, and you might never see that episode again.
I remember as a kid, being so bummed out that we were going to be at my grandmother’s Pocono house (with its terrible TV reception) when the second part of a to-be-continued Little House on the Prairie episode aired. Thankfully, a neighbor down the road had a cable subscription and Grandma was able to get them to allow me to come over and watch the show. I remember my parents getting irritated by a whole series of to-be-continued Punky Brewster episodes interfering with our weekend plans.
These days, with the exception of live sports or other live events, there simply isn’t the same sort of audience tuning in at one time to see a show. Even with popular network shows like Abbot Elementary probably half the audience or more is watching the show at their own preferred time via Hulu as opposed to when the episode actually airs. Streaming services are great because we don’t have to rearrange our schedules around when a show is on, but perhaps it’s also made the world a little more fractured. We no longer have that shared experience of all watching a show at the same time.
If you spend any time on social media you will repeatedly see show creators begging/reminding people to watch their shows so that they don’t get cancelled. It’s a strange world we live in, and I can’t help feeling a little bit of guilt that it took me so long to get into Winning Time. Not that one set of eyeballs would have saved the show, but there’s probably a lot of people like me who have so much on their lists that they want to watch, and only so much time to watch them.
Of course, a big part of the blame lies with streaming networks who really don’t give shows a chance before pulling the plug on them. The last episode of Winning Time only aired a few days ago. I also really don’t understand the marketing decisions they make. Every week HBO Max sends out an email of “what is popular” on Max and it’s the same 8-10 reality and true crime shows, week after week, despite the fact that nobody in this Max household is watching anything remotely similar.
The days of all of us tuning in at the same bat time, are long gone. I suspect that there will be some contraction in the streaming world with some streaming services gobbling up other ones. As it is, there are a lot of different streaming “channels” out there and there’s no way anyone can subscribe to them all, or watch more than a fraction of the content they have available. In the meantime I’ll be over here two (or more, who am I kidding?) steps behind the rest of the world, watching slowly.
— Alissa
P.S. If any of you out there are an early adopter and are already using Bluesky, I did just recently sign up. Find me at @alissagrosso.bsky.social
Weekly Inspiration
What I’m Reading: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland
What I’m Watching: The Tomorrow is Picture Day TikTok video
What I’m Listening to: “My Favorite Mutiny” by The Coup
Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com
Find out more about my digital art at alissacarin.com
My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.
Creativity and Contentment 