There’s too much content these days. (Get off my lawn.) It’s a good problem to have, certainly. But sometimes I feel like the Burgess Meredith character in The Twilight Zone, who just wants the world to go away so he has time to read all the books. (Listen, kids, if you’re not up on the greatest episodes of the original TZ, I say again, get off my lawn.) The point is, if my actual life would just take a break for a minute…or a year…or five years…then maybe I’d have time to catch up on all the shows and movies everyone is always telling me to watch.
But I have kids, several of them! Kids take up a LOT of time, y’all. Plus there are whole categories of shows/movies you can’t watch while they’re around. And then there’s all the “having adult responsibilities” and the “getting sleep” standing in the way of watching stuff.
I don’t understand how everybody else is so up on every single episode of every show out there. First of all, you have to figure out what streaming service the stupid thing is on. And then you have to remember your password, and you never do, or else somebody in the family has reset it and it’s a whole thing and then you’re fifteen minutes in before you’ve even found the damn show to start watching. Sometimes you don’t have that streaming service, and then you have to find a free trial subscription. Don’t even get me started on the fact that different people in the family watching different shows at different times means the streamer doesn’t know which episode you left off on, so then you have to search through all the unhelpful episode “summaries” and try to figure it out, which usually means you start watching at least one episode you already saw before you get it right. People, I have like one hour a night to watch TV! I don’t have time for this nonsense! Back in the day, do you know what we did? When it was time for a show to come on–as it did, once a week, we TURNED ON THE TV AND WATCHED IT. All you had to know was what channel it was on.
And then what’s the strategy? Do you binge the entire series before you move on to the next one that everyone says you have to see? Do you stick with it, even though the rest of the world stopped talking about it two months ago, or do you try to add on a second series, one that’s hot right now? What if you’re binging one but the other one only drops one episode a week, interrupting your flow? Do you wait for them all to be available so you can binge the whole thing or do you watch it as it airs? Can you handle watching two series at once? What if they’re on different goddamn streaming services? (See above.)
Here’s my point. A while back, I watched the pilot of Tulsa King. It was good! Sly can act. But I have no idea where to find it again, and I’m not going to look. I’m letting it go. I’m not going to watch that show. It’s not really my kind of thing, and so even though the internet tells me it’s actually a damn good television program, I am giving myself permission to not watch it. I’m also going to let go of my guilt over the fact that I stopped watching Outlander in the middle of season two and admit to myself that I’m never going back to finish that series. Friends, I stopped watching Stranger Things like halfway through season one, and I grew up in the ’80s! I actually liked that show and understood it intimately. I don’t even know why I stopped watching it, but it’s time to admit I’m never going back. I never saw Squid Game (oh, it’s all coming out now) and I don’t even know what it’s about. I’M NOT GOING TO WATCH IT. I don’t care, I don’t want to and I will not be shamed into it.
It’s okay to not see every single thing out there! Shout it from the rooftops. It doesn’t mean you’re not cool. It doesn’t mean you’re out of touch, or lame, or old, or any of the other things I definitely am but not for this reason. What it means is that you have been presented with a smorgasbord of entertainment options, and you can pick and choose. In fact, you should pick and choose, because baby, you are never gonna see it all. There were 559 original series available to watch in 2021. 599 in 2022. And that’s not even getting into the movies that we all watch on our TVs now (or our phones, but I refuse to speak of that).
It’s okay to not see every single thing out there! Shout it from the rooftops.
In summary, consuming entertainment has become too complicated, we should all feel free to watch only what we want, it’s okay to quit a show in the middle, having cable bundles was actually far more sensible than the current insanity we put up with, and everybody needs to get off my lawn.
