WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN TO WATCH TELEVISION THESE DAYS?
WHAT DOES ‘WATCHING TV’ EVEN MEAN IN 2017?
Iconsider myself a fan of truTV’s popular comedy game show Billy on the Street with Billy Eichner. I’ve rhapsodized over the series to friends. I’ve declared my affection for it on Twitter. I’ve called my mother up to insist that she watch it. None of this is unusual. What’s odd is that I’ve never seen Billy on the Street with Billy Eichner — not really.
I’ve never settled in on the couch on Tuesday nights at 10: 30 p. m. to enjoy the show’s latest instalment as it’s airing. I have no idea how long an episode actually runs. I haven’t a clue about its full- length format, its commercial bumpers or its opening credits and theme music — assuming it even has those. So I like Billy on the Street. I just know next to nothing about what it’s like to watch it on television.
This poses an important question: what exactly do we mean when we say “television?” The word can seem misleadingly broad, and what we mean depends a great deal on the context. A television is a physical object: the TV, the glittering black rectangle in your living room. Television is a vehicle for content: broadcast television, the method by which media is beamed from network satellites and antennas and underground cables into your home. And television is the content itself: TV, the programming, the soap operas and sitcoms and award- winning prestige dramas that constitute a channel’s nightly bill of fare.
For a very long time these things were synonymous. If you’d mentioned to a co- worker, in 1993, that you’d spent the evening watching television, it would have been assumed that you’d watched something like The X- Files transmitted to you by way of FOX in prime time from Los Angeles, and that what you watched i t on was your cathode- ray tube TV set. That’s because there was simply no other possible arrangement. For nearly the entire history of television, the set, the programs and the medium were one and the same.
The Internet disrupted that harmony and atomized TV. Just think of the arrangements possible today: cable TV providers like Rogers and Bell offer pro- gramming across broadcast TV service and a multitude of additional platforms; TV units exist happily in homes without any broadcast cable service, wired instead to video game consoles and DVD players and media devices of all sorts; shows like Stranger Things, The OA and Black Mirror may be binged by the season straight from Netflix with no TV set or cable subscription required. What do you assume, now, when a co- worker tells you that they spent last night watching television? That they torrented the Westworld finale on their MacBook? That they checked out Transparent on Amazon Prime? Or perhaps they just sat on the couch and had Law & Order zapped into their flatscreen direct from NBC.
These additional options have been available for some time. What’s different now is the way in which television has begun to respond. A new series, in a bid to drum up attention, may well focus its attention on a viewership whose constituency exists mainly online. They do this through segments designed expressly for fleeting consumption, to be enjoyed on the fly from a smartphone on YouTube or embedded on a Facebook feed. In short, the new TV is no TV: it’s television as web content, a full- length cable series chopped into digestible portions and distributed on social media one morsel at a time.
Sketch comedy in particular has found a great deal of success with this strategy. Which is why so many people who would count themselves as fans of Insider Amy Schumer or Key and Peele have never actually seen a full episode. Look closely and you’ll spot a pattern emerging in the kinds of sketches bestsuited to Internet fame: punchy, topical material with an identifiable point or selling feature, the more convenient for news writers to package into a post and describe in a tweet or headline.
This impulse to arouse online interest in lieu of traditional viewers has all but taken over the late- night industry: Fallon and Kimmel have been engaged since their inaugurations in a war for viral supremacy, each YouTube- wildfire stunt oneupped the next night with another, until the highest aspiration of a Hollywood idol is to demean herself with a lip sync battle or another publicist- tooled gimmick guaranteed to maximize social- media reach. John Oliver has a thousand times the audience on the Internet than he draws to Last Week Tonight on HBO. Carpool Karaoke, meanwhile, has a strong claim on being the single most popular thing in the entire world today in any medium. How many of its admirers do you want to bet don’t even know it’s a merely a segment on The Late Late Show?
And of course there’s my beloved Billy Eichner. The format of his series — in which the manic firebrand charges at people in the middle of the street to demand their ( usually nonexistent) opinion of the latest pop- cultural arcana, often with celebrities in tow — lends itself especially well to the Facebook post or the Twitter embed, and is highly enjoyable, perhaps only tolerable, in portions of five minutes or less. This, of course, prompts another question: supposing Billy on the Street really is destined by its very nature to be watched online, five minutes at a time, why bother putting on the air in 30-minute segments in the first place?
Television as a concept has undergone radical change since the Internet has ascended as the dominant media platform. The content has begun to reflect that change, but perhaps it doesn’t reflect it quite enough just yet.
FOR NEARLY THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF TV, THE SET, THE PROGRAMS AND THE MEDIUM WERE ONE AND THE SAME.