I Hate-Watched TV Shows Before There Was A Word For It
And Honestly The People Who Say They Do It Now — They Don’t Have The Really Spirit I Did
I’ve been baffled by the ongoing trend of hate-watching — watching an entire series for a prolonged period of time for reasons that don’t even fit the ‘so bad it’s good model’ — but I wasn’t sure why until recently. And I think it’s because, based on what I’ve heard, they don’t seem to hate-watch the way they did when I was doing it.
I realize what I sound like by saying this, and I know it may sound like I’m being the worst model of everything I despise about nostalgia in every format. But hear me out.
I didn’t realize when I was doing it during the 2000s and well into the 2010s that it was ‘hate-watching’. I knew I was watching series like The Closer and Ray Donovan for reasons that I wasn’t watching Mad Men or 24 but I didn’t call it hate-watching. For me, it was about morality. If you’ve read my articles on these series (and I’ve covered both of them a bit if you want to dive deep in my columns) the reason I kept watching all of these shows was out of a sense of misguided morality. In my opinion Kyra Sedgwick and Live Schreiber were engaging in just morally contemptible behavior week after week and being rewarded for it that I spent far too much time watching these shows hoping against hope that there would eventually be some kind of consequences for these loathsome characters. (In the case of the latter, I was rewarded but not until the series was officially over.)
It shouldn’t come as a shock to my long-time (and in this case, long suffering) readers that the biggest target of this kind of wrath was Shondaland. And I have to tell you I was committed to that to an extent that might baffle so many of these so-called hate-watchers who seem to do so more out of laziness than any real hatred. Because when it came many of Shonda Rhimes shows I committed to this.
During the first five seasons of Grey’s Anatomy in the era when there was no streaming and not much in syndication I would record episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. On videotapes. I did the same for the first three seasons of Scandal much of which ran against series I actually liked, most significantly Parenthood. I did the same for the first three seasons of How to Get Away With Murder and though I kept telling myself I would stop, much of the fourth season. And just to tell you of my commitment, I wrote a Scandal fanfic which basically had all of the characters being punished for the actions they took when they stole the election that started everything out for Olivia Pope and Fitzgerald Grant. Not only does that show how much I hate the series, it also shows that I basically was violating one of the tenets of fanfic which is that you like the series you’re writing about.
But after a while as seasons went by and all of the characters in these series kept doing horrible things and never getting punished I had an epiphany. This was a waste of my time. Meredith Grey and the staff at Seattle Grace were never going to actually follow anything remotely resembling medical ethics. Olivia Pope and her gladiators were never going to be punished for covering up the imbroglios of the Grant administration and they certainly weren’t go to make any changes for the better. Annalyse Keating was going to help the Keating Five get away with murder even if it meant innocent people had to go to jail or die. Hoping that was ever going to change was a waste of time.
And with so much other good Tv around why would I want to expend so much time and energy on shows that appalled me? It defeated the logic of being both a critic and a fan of television, which is you’re supposed to get some pleasure out of what you’re doing. Considering that watching network TV becomes a habit so ingrained that breaking out of your routine takes an extra bit of effort that people raised on streaming can’t comprehend, this was a big effort for me.
But I did it. And there was something fundamentally freeing of this. One of the descriptors of hate-watching, according to a recent article in the Times, is that you are watching a series that the world thinks is great but you don’t. If you’ve read my columns you know that I’ve done a variation of this over the years in what I call the Overrated series. But the key difference is, in large part because of having spent the last decade dealing with this is Shondaland, I never felt compelled to do more than the bare minimum with these series. I never watched more than the first season of Ozark, gave the first and half of Season 2 of Westworld a try before throwing in the towel and after just two episodes of Euphoria would be more than happy if the series never comes back from hiatus. I hated all of these shows but not enough to spend time and energy doing so.
And over the last few years as streaming has taken over more and more of our viewing lives I’ve basically taken the same approach. I will give a series a certain amount of my time but if I don’t like it, barring extraordinary circumstances I will not return to it. (One exception was Fleishmann is in Trouble which in hindsight didn’t give value for its time.) I have more free time then I imagine most hate-watchers do — I’ve been out of work the past three years — but I have enough trouble keeping up with series I actually like. And frankly I don’t have enough time for even some of the series I should be watching. The Morning Show is in a way Schrodinger’s TV: it might be outstanding; it might be deserving of hate-watching. I’ll never know because I missed the first season and at this point I’m not going to spend time and energy trying to get through three seasons just to find out I hate it.
That’s the part of this I don’t follow. I spend a lot of time watching streaming TV but I am far from a slave to the algorithm. On the contrary, I chose my shows regardless of what my viewing history tells me I might like. Hard it is may be for Gen Z or people younger than thirty to comprehend, I like to make up my own mind as to what I’m going to watch and I have little to no faith in any streaming service will no better than I.
And honestly, if you’re so lazy that if a series like Emily in Paris pops up on Netflix and you don’t have the energy to go away from it after five minutes even though you hate it and you keep watching it for three seasons well, then I truly have no hope for the next generation of TV watchers. When I hate watched Shameless or Agents of Shield its because I cared enough to put the time and energy in to make the effort to watch it. I had better things to be watching, many better things. But I was willing to use recordings and spend time and energy to actually watch it either on the air or in reruns. That’s commitment. Not being too slothful to stop watching a series because you don’t have to energy to fight the power of what Netflix tells you to watch.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve increasingly decided I haven’t got time to find series just to spend hours hate-watching them. And I can’t understand this generation’s desire to spend all its time and energy watching something they don’t like, even apparently as background noise. I get not wanting to give a show you love full attention while you’re checking your email or some trivial tasks but there are so many syndicated shows on the air from the 1990s. Hell, half the channels on my cable service show Law and Order reruns twenty four hours a day and that’s the definition of a series you don’t need to pay attention to in order to follow. Oh that’s right, your generation doesn’t want to pay for cable. Well, then find it on a streaming service you like.
And just speaking for myself to you twenty-somethings or younger: how can we trust you to solve any of the problems of solving the global crises if the algorithm of your favorite series is so sacred to you that if Netflix tells you to watch Emily in Paris, you can’t spare three second to type it no or move away from it? Is your everyday life that vital that moving a button is to much of an effort?
It isn’t for me. Over the years I’ve been told by Netflix to watch Ozark, Hulu to watch Handmaid’s Tale, Apple to watch Servant and so many other shows I’ve lost count. It takes me three seconds on a remote for television to move away from it to a show I like. Are your metrics for television as fragile as your egos so often seem to be online?
As for me I learned my lesson. Two years ago when Bridgerton was up for multiple Emmys I watched the first three episodes, found them utterly distasteful, and have never bothered to even look at it again. I’m not going to give power to Shonda Rhimes or any of the other shows I initially find terrible when there are so many other series out there I love or might reward me with their energy. You want to spend your time hate-watching And Just Like That or so many other series, it’s your funeral. You have a commitment to your attitude towards these shows that is incomprehensible to a man who realized two seasons in how ridiculous Riverdale was and decided he was better off never watching another episode. For the record I also recorded a few episodes of it, but I never had the time and energy to watch them. Those of you who apparently watched every episode: was it really worth it? It didn’t seem that way when I saw it but what do I know? Maybe it got better after Archie ran into the bear.