HOW THE STREAMERS KILLED POP CULTURE

Written by: Sarah Marrs

Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV+ changed how we watch TV, but at the expense of the watercooler moments that once united us.

Few things have been as disruptive to film and television in the 21st century as streaming, a sea change on par with the arrival of the ‘Talkies’ in the 1920s. Streaming added ‘bingeing’ to our lexicon; it gave us ‘Netflix and chill’, but it also fractured the cultural landscape in a way that might be irreparable. We used to have ‘watercooler’ shows, those television programs everyone watched at the same time week to week and discussed the day after as a shared cultural touchstone, but streaming, with its watch-what-you-want- when-you-want binge model, is the antithesis of watercooler TV.

The streaming landscape began with Netflix in the early 2010s, but after nearly a decade of development, almost every major Hollywood movie studio, and their affiliate television networks, has their own streaming platform. Netflix itself has turned into a behemoth, with more shows than any one person could ever hope to watch. The point is not for one person to watch everything, though, it’s for Netflix to provide something for everyone, with an array of programming designed to appeal to as many tastes as possible. It’s a ‘content firehose’, an unceasing blast of stuff that pummels viewers into submission, burying us under a digital mountain of suggestions, top tens, and endless queues. Keeping up is impossible, and the result is that we’re rarely watching the same thing at the same time – the water cooler is gone.

Game of Thrones is arguably the last of the great water cooler shows. Not only a cultural phenomenon, but one that demanded each new episode be viewed as soon as it premiered, lest you be left behind the next day as everyone picked apart each interaction and plot point, searching for context clues and hints to what would happen next. It wasn’t enough to watch Game of Thrones, you had to watch it right now, or you wouldn’t be part of ‘The Conversation’ that dominated pop culture for 10 weeks every year for eight years (okay, fine, seven and six weeks, respectively, during those last couple of years nobody likes to talk about). Even as streaming rose to prominence, even as Netflix became so ubiquitous it became a verb, Game of Thrones remained the King of Watercooler Television, a must-watch series for anyone wanting to participate in pop culture.

Streaming has never produced a Game of Thrones. The closest analog are Netflix’s Squid Games, The Queen’s Gambit, and Stranger Things. But where Game of Thrones grew its audience each year, The Queen’s Gambit is a one-and-done limited series – when was the last time you discussed it with anyone? And with each successive season, Stranger Things loses clout and cachet, a phenomenon unique to streaming, because no matter how big a streaming show is when it debuts, even by the second season there is a palpable loss of impact. The exceptions are very rare, such as Fleabag, whose second season was a bigger phenomenon than the first (Oh hello, Hot Priest!), and Bojack Horseman, which benefitted from making all the ‘Best shows you’re not watching’ lists after its freshman season. But for the most part, streaming shows hit big and fade fast – if they hit at all – and even the most popular shows only drive wider cultural conversations for a few weeks, at best.

Partly this is the fault of bingeing, which encourages viewers to devour everything at once and move on quickly, but it’s also a result of the sheer amount of content – a hideous word that perfectly describes the disposable nature of television in the streaming era yet renders cinema meaningless – that exists across streaming as a landscape. As soon as one show finishes, there are three more to watch. There’s no time to savour anything. And because we’re all watching different shows on different schedules, there’s often no-one to talk about our recent discoveries with, to prolong, and grow, our enthusiasm beyond the initial moment of discovery.

I’m not advocating for the end of streaming, convenience once obtained is rarely reversed, and bingeing is dashed convenient. But in its second decade – its teen years, if you will – I hope streaming, as both a means of producing television and watching it, finds a way to bring us together like the water cooler shows of old did, and not keep driving us further apart into our own isolated pods of experience. Television can be a unique unifying force in pop culture, providing a shared experience that can be enjoyed across socio-political boundaries. Streaming, however, has not figured out how to create those touchstone moments that define pop culture. It serves the individual, not the community, and it takes a community to create culture Streaming is now less a watercooler, and more a water fountain.