TV bingers... wait a week and get back the rhythm of life
IN November 1980, the world came to a standstill. I was in Dublin on the day in question and when I got to Tara Street Dart station, there was only one conversation on the lips of everyone on the platform, and indeed for the entire train journey home: who shot JR?
The Dallas obsession began eight months earlier, when the last episode of the third series ended with what generally is regarded as the greatest television cliffhanger of all time. Roguish oil baron JR Ewing, played with malevolent glee by the late Larry Hagman, hears a noise outside his office door and when he goes to investigate, shots ring out and he is hit twice in the abdomen, leaving viewers unsure if he is even alive, never mind who shot him.
Culprit
It would be eight long months, and four episodes into the next series, before we found out it was Kristin Shepard, JR’s sister-inlaw, with whom he had been having an affair. In that time, literally millions of Who Shot JR? T-shirts were sold. Bookies took bets on the likely culprit. The reveal was a phenomenon, watched by 350million viewers worldwide and recording what, at the time, was the highest audience in US history, at 83 million. The frenzy was such that, while I was waiting on my Dart in Dublin, the Turkish parliament closed early so MPs could get home in time to watch it.
And while the episode first aired in the US a day before we saw it here, there was no social media to spoil the surprise, so we watched completely unaware of who pulled the trigger.
I was reminded of it while watching Sunday night’s episode of Line Of Duty, the corrupt cops series that delivers cliffhangers of its own at the end of every episode, this week’s being the personal relationship of potentially bent copper Jo Davidson to a character as yet unknown. When Superintendent Ted Hastings saw the name and gasped ‘Mother of God!’ there was a wonderful feeling of community in the fact that up to 12 million people in Britain and Ireland gasped along with him, even if we don’t yet know what we were gasping at.
It was a reminder that it always used to be like this, before the dawn of streaming services that drop an entire series on their platforms in one go. Last year, when the latest series (and yes, I still say ‘series’, not that wretched Americanism ‘season’) of The Crown debuted on Netflix, there were people who had watched all episodes before I had even got out of bed. I’ll never understand the pleasure in that, because to me it seems like the grim determination you have to bring to a chore like clearing out the garden shed or painting the spare bedroom that’s used by guests maybe once a year.
If someone told you that the film you were going to see in the cinema ran for ten or 12 hours, you wouldn’t bother leaving the house, yet there are millions who think nothing of putting in those hours in their own living rooms, and then spoil it for everyone else by broadcasting key plot points on Twitter or Facebook.
When everyone is compelled to watch at the same time, a great television series becomes watercooler legend, debated and parsed at every opportunity for the seven days before the next episode airs. It becomes a focal point of the week, never mind just the television week, an appointment to look forward to, especially in the weird times in which we now find ourselves.
Last year, it was that compelling BBC drama The Nest, and more recently the thriller Bloodlands, also about police corruption and from the same production stable as Line Of Duty. The end of the second episode of that series (spoiler alert!) revealed that Detective Chief Inspector Tom Brannick was a coldblooded killer and, like millions of others, I was stunned into mouthing ‘what just happened?’ (well, I’ve left two words out of what I actually said, because this is a family newspaper!).
There is a delicious pleasure in being made to wait to find out, one that seems to go against the pervasive modern desire for instant gratification. Indeed, streaming services are said to be looking at a return to the old ways. Disney+ already did it with the Star Wars spinoff, The Mandalorian, and it makes sense, especially in pandemic times.
Binge watchers regularly say they’ve already seen everything that’s available, though that seems a fairly elaborate boast, and any subscription model is based on keeping fresh content coming. Spreading it out seems an obvious fix to ensure everyone keeps paying month by month.
The only time I ever watch a few episodes in a row, it tends to be American comedies such as Modern Family or Frasier. Stripped of the ads, they run for around 22 minutes, and I often watch three back to back while I’m having my lunch, but the idea of crashing out on the couch for eight hours holds absolutely no appeal for me.
Cliffhanger
On Sunday night at nine o’clock, though, that’s exactly where I will be again, finding out if Jo Davidson is related to Tommy Hunter or John Corbett, characters from previous series of Line Of Duty, or maybe to someone we haven’t thought of at all. And, yes, if there is a single downside to watching a show like this over the course of the nine years it has been running, it’s that you sometimes forget minute details that become front and centre later on.
Nonetheless, it’s still preferable to take the week to digest what you know and speculate on what you don’t, and to build an entire Sunday around the excitement of anticipation.
More than 40 years after we finally found out who shot JR, there’s still nothing to beat a cliffhanger, to feel the same tingles at exactly the same time as millions of others, and to count the beats, the natural rhythm, of a story well told.