Ranting On...The Dwindling Community of Television

(This post discusses quite a few spoilers from the entire series of How I Met Your Mother, and also why this sort of spoiler alert for an eight-year-old series shouldn't be necessary, but I'll say it anyway) Last night, I was watching with baited breath for the big reveal on How I Met Your Mother, and couldn't have been more thrilled.  As a loyal viewer of this show for years and years, I have been hoping for the big meeting of the mother, and whether we'd learn about her prior to Ted meeting her in the title scene.  Turns out, we'll get to know a little bit about her (at least that she can rock a killer pair of boots) as the mother is none other than Tony nominee Cristin Milioti, as was revealed in the final moments of the series.

What I did afterwards was, after crying and freaking out, head to Twitter and to text, and I realized something-I didn't know if anyone who watched How I Met Your Mother had just watched the episode.  I have people I know who watch this show-it's been fairly popular with my group of friends (we're just under the ages of the actors in the show, and so there's a lot to relate to), but some of them have DVR's, some of them buy or rent the DVD's at the end of the season and watch them in binge, and I obviously didn't want to ruin this for them.  After all, I'm in their shoes all of the time-I watch three different networks regularly on Thursday nights, and since I do write-ups of Glee and usually need more time to process it, I regularly wait until Saturday to actually watch the show.  Ditto Sunday nights, when I have to decide between Veep and Mad Men.  One of them is going to be sacrificed until the next day thanks to the cruel "only-one-cable-show" laws of the TiVo.

What I realized though, with something as big as HIMYM is that while DVR's and TiVo are in a way saving network television-allowing them to compete on the same scale as YouTube and Hulu, it's also killing the event of television.  Last night was a huge moment in the series of HIMYM, but I don't dare post about it on Facebook for fear of my friends yelling in retribution.

This isn't just a problem for morning after shows-every person on the planet seems to be in a various state of knowledge on Game of Thrones, depending on whether you've read the books or not.  Then there are the people who don't have HBO, or do have it but are saving it up to watch it in a "binge viewing."  It gets to the point where you can't have that fun, obsessive discussion about the series.

Because that, honestly, is a good chunk of the fun of a series, and both not watching it live and binge-viewing multiple seasons for the first time or waiting a week before you see it takes away from that joy.  Lost is the greatest show on the planet, but it wouldn't have been nearly as fun if I hadn't had to obsess, week in and week out, the outcomes of the mysteries being put in front of me.  This isn't to say that a television show can't be enjoyed in binge-viewing (my constant love of Sex and the City can attest to that fact), but it's not the same delight.

Looking back at How I Met Your Mother, if you binge-watched this show in the course of a month, you'd certainly laugh, likely even love it, but you wouldn't get the flow of years of watching the series.  The Ted-Robin-Barney love triangle would seem rather repetitive, rather than a once every other year flare-up.  You wouldn't get the fun of discussing what will happen next week with Barney and Quinn, when Lily and Marshall break-up how long it will be for them to reunite, which of these many, many, MANY (Ted gets around) women will end up being the enigmatic title character.  You'll get instant satisfaction, which is something we tend to prize more than all else in our society, but you won't get to imagine what happens next, you won't get to become involved in the art.

That involvement with the art is one of the most distinctive and magical things about television, and something to be treasured.  Movies (at least those that aren't never-ending series), books, paintings, music-they have a finite space that they're going to occupy.  At most, we'll experience them for the first time for a few hours, a couple of days, and then it'll be done.  With television, we get to experience these characters and plots over the course of years.  My slowly closing twenties are defined by many things, but I would be remiss if I didn't credit John Locke, Pam Beasley, Blaine Anderson, Bree Van de Kamp, Robb Stark, Joan Harris, Ted Mosby, Hannah Horvath, and Eric Cartman take their credit for shaping them.  I have grown to love these characters and those that occupy their universes in the past ten years.  I don't only watch shows that I love (New Girl and Modern Family are both shows that I enjoy, but I haven't gotten to the point where I would be devestated if I missed this week's episodes or if someone spoiled them in advance), but the one's that I do love, it's partially because I have had to wait years, rather than just hours, to see them get their happy endings.

I'm not 100% certain where I'm taking this post, but before I get there, I just want to get to the larger concept of the spoiler.  This is something that I years ago gave up on indulging in, and not just on television, but in films and books as well.  I'm not talking about the art of the spoiler alert, which is a lovely and generous thing to bestow (you'll note that I always put them in every review, even for things that aren't traditionally considered spoilers, as I consider everything that is about to happen in a movie or a tv show a spoiler), but on the sneak peak spoilers that websites like Entertainment Weekly and Buzzfeed frequently share.  I don't want to know the exclusive information that Ryan Murphy or Carter Bays is sharing about next week's episode-I want to discover it along with the rest of the world.  What's the fun in knowing the end of something before it begins?  This is why I in particular hate anything other than a teaser trailer-think of how flawless the trailer to Gravity was, or the original Tree of Life sneak peek.  These made you want to get into the movie theater, and I don't need to know more than that.  Inevitably, fanboys will start pining for more information to Gravity, and the studio, eager to gain buzz, will give it to them, but why?  We all are going to see it-it looks amazing, and if that trailer doesn't draw you in, what else possibly could? 

Okay, needed to get that out into the universe.  In conclusion, I'm not sure this is a rant with a great suggestion like others have been.  I'll continue to catch up on series like everyone else-either through a DVD catchup on a show that I for some reason have never gotten around to (Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad, I'm looking at you) and will likely stockpile episodes of shows until the end of the week rather than watching them live, but I'm going to try to avoid it more, I guess.  I don't want the special magic that happens after eight years of hoping for a moment on a show like How I Met Your Mother to disappear just because it isn't convenient at the time.