Golden age of binge-TV turns on a new audience
WE’VE come full circle. It doesn’t seem long ago that responsible parents were berating their children for watching too much television while, at the same time, complaining there was nothing decent to watch for themselves.
Now? The reverse is the case. According to a new report, older viewers are spending an excessive amount of their waking hours watching live telly, bingeing on box sets, surfing various obscure satellite channels and generally becoming couch potatoes.
In contrast, it is the millennials who are finding other things to do, aware that there’s more to life than staring at a screen, especially when they’ve probably been staring at one for most of the day at work.
Media analysts Midia has conducted a survey of 1,000 over-55s and it shows the proportion of those who say they regularly watch several episodes of a television series in one sitting has almost doubled in the last 12 months. Nearly a third now admit to bingeing, up from 18 per cent last year.
There’s a good reason for this. British television is in the throes of a remarkable golden period, possibly the most glittering there has ever been. We’re spoilt for choice.
In fact, I’m beginning to think there is now too much good telly, making bigger and bigger demands on our time – and it’s younger people who are cottoning on to this. Apparently, they have reached what Midia calls “peak binge” and are starting to turn their backs on the likes of Netflix, Amazon and BBC iPlayer.
The proportion of self-confessed binge-watchers among those aged 25 to 34 has dropped from 38 per cent to 35 per cent in the past year, which might explain why TV companies are targeting older viewers. ITV, for example, is in the habit of broadcasting episodes of dramas on consecutive nights rather than once a week, something Kevin Lygo, the channel’s director of television, calls “elderly box sets”.
Channel 5 is doing likewise, especially when it comes to documentaries about the Royal Family, which the broadcaster is in the habit of showing consecutively on the same day rather than even waiting 24 hours.
Increasingly, among middle-aged friends of mine, conversations can be heard along these lines: “Are you watching Peaky Blinders?” or “What do you think of Sanditon – we’re loving it?” or “Can’t wait for the new Crown series to arrive”.
And now that the autumn schedules have been made available it’s going to be hard – if not impossible
– to resist many of the tasty offerings on the broadcasting menu. Already intriguing us is Holliday Grainger in BBC One’s surveillance crime thriller The Capture.
SOON to come are Helen Mirren in Sky’s period mini-series Catherine The Great; Blake Harrison in BBC One war epic World On Fire; and Sarah Lancashire in Welsh-set Channel 4 disaster drama The Light.
And that’s just the serious stuff. On a lighter note, there’s Strictly; I’m A Celebrity; Celebrity Masterchef and all kinds of wildlife programmes which always appeal to those whose own wild lives are possibly behind them. What it
shows – apart from older people having more time on their hands than younger generations – is that competition is a good thing. With the arrival of Netflix and Amazon, terrestial broadcasters such as the Beeb and ITV have had to raise their game.
“I get the sense that the video landscape is getting too crowded for millennials,” says Amanda Stears, video analyst at Midia. “When you get on Neflix there are hundreds of shows.
What do you pick? If you’re not going to have watercooler chats or discuss it over social media, is it worth watching?” To which the answer, for those of us not consumed by social media, is... yes.
The origins of this TV revival are hard to nail down. Some people credit the American company HBO which, in 1999, decided to air The Sopranos. Originally it was intended to be a one-off feature film but bosses had other ideas. Good decision. It ran for six series and won 21 Emmys, driving up subscriptions for HBO and earning the network millions in DVD sales. Paul Weitz, a screenwriter and director whose credits include American Pie and About A Boy, has articulated the shift: “Your agent used to say, ‘Don’t do TV, it will hurt your film career.’ Now it’s the other way around.”
Mind you, all this good telly adds pressure to our lives. If you’re not up to date you have to play catchup, and that’s tiring. Long gone are the days when if you missed a show then you, well, missed it. In our household, we have a long list of programmes we hope to catch up on at some point – but when?
LINE Of Duty is the most vexing. Heaven knows how many series there have been but we’ve still to watch the first. Do we give up and feel left out of the party? Or tuck into the box set and become one of the crowd?
There’s an impact on all our social lives, too. BBC Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis said last week that she and husband are like “ships that pass in the night” because of her work schedule during the week.
So what do they do at weekends? Plonk themselves on the sofa with a box set and a bottle of red wine, Maitlis told Good Houskeeping.
Come to think of it, my wife and I do have one catch-up success – but we feel a little guilty about it. Whereas a lot of viewers long ago gave up on Sky Atlantic’s The Affair, starring Dominic West and Ruth Wilson (at least – spoiler alert – it used to star Ruth but she was killed off towards the end of Series Four), we are still going, devouring the current, and final, Series Five on Tuesday nights. We’re fully aware that we should have pulled the plug after Series Two because the plot had become so convoluted and improbable.
Another drawback to all this good TV is that seldom are we all watching the same thing at the same time. I have had numerous conversations during which I have said to a friend or work colleague: “What did you think of the murder scene in...” only for them to shout: “Don’t say another word! I haven’t got there yet.”
We’ve come a long way from the time (pre-1986) when there was not even one second of daytime TV. And remember all that complaining we used to do about the “rubbish” on our screens?
No one can complain now. A TV bonanza is upon us and we might as well celebrate it. How strangely comforting that while Britain as a whole stutters into an unknown future, the box in the corner of our living rooms is maintaining standards and taking our minds off the chaos.