Delayed gratification, spoilering and ‘squelching wetly’ The 2022 year in television is marked as much by how we watched as what we loved, not to mention who we loved to hate By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 5:00 PM CST Monday, Dec. 26, 2022

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/12/2022 (730 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The year-end television list is usually just that, a list. Top this, best that, in increments of 10 or 15 or, in the case of this year, 22. Sometimes, it’s not just “top” or “best,” but rather “essential” or “important” or “defining” (which, wow, relax).

But the truth is, there are simply too many shows to do that here. It’s possible, in 2022, for two people to have two completely different viewing habits; even those of us who watch a lot of TV will stumble on shows we’ve never even heard of. We have been perched precariously on the peak of Peak TV for years — per FX Research, a record 559 original scripted series aired across cable, broadcast and streaming in 2021, a spike owing, at least in part, to series that had experienced pandemic-related production delays in 2020. To put that number into context, there were 266 original scripted series on television in 2011, prior to the advent of streaming.

But a year in TV is not just defined by what we watched, but how we watched it. (Though it does seem everyone watched White Lotus, at least.) Here’s how we watched TV in 2022.

The end of the binge-watching era?

One of the initial perks of the streaming revolution was having every single episode in an entire season of television drop at the same time. For those of us who grew up with Appointment Television in the Must-See-TV ’90s and 2000s — as well as the agonizing experience of having to wait an entire summer to see how that cliff-hanging season finale turned out — this was a mind-blowing game-changer. We could just… watch the whole thing. And thus, binge watching — watching most of or an entire season in one go — became the norm. We can thank Netflix for that. The former streaming top dog has always dropped seasons in full, starting with House of Cards.

But over the past few seasons, there has been a marked return to the new-episode-weekly format of yore, with many of this year’s hottest prestige shows — the final season of Better Call Saul, White Lotus, Severance, Fleishman Is in Trouble, Yellowjackets and others — embracing the weekly model. Netflix isn’t the only streaming game in town anymore, either, and the other big services — including AppleTV+ and Disney+ — have never done full-season drops. Neither have those that straddle streaming and cable, such as HBO and FX.

Appointment Television, as it turns out, has its perks. Binging makes the whole enterprise feel like fast-food or “content”: delicious, disposable and leaving you wanting more. Watching a show over eight or 10 weeks versus eight or 10 hours allows buzz to build, certainly, but it also gives the viewer time to digest what they are consuming.

Spoiler alert

The heyday of blogs and online publications brought with it the Recap Industrial Complex. It is, at many places, someone’s whole job to recap episodes of television shows.

The best include analysis; the worst are “here’s what happened.” But while release schedules are slowing down, spoilers are as much of a social-media minefield as ever. People live-tweet season finales as though they are one-off cultural events like a Super Bowl or an Oscars. Sometimes even a headline in a publication will include a spoiler, or something spoiler adjacent — “director talks about that heart-wrenching ending” — mere hours after something has aired.

And spoilers don’t just arrive in the form of tweets or analysis. They are increasingly arriving in memes. While not necessarily giving away plot points — think of them more like context-free episode trailers — they do sometimes ruin a joke.

The rise of subtitles

A study released in late 2021 by the captioning charity Stagetext revealed something interesting: four out of five 18- to 25-year-olds use closed captions or subtitles all or part of the time. By contrast, less than a quarter of 56- to 75-year-olds use subtitles, despite also being twice as likely to report they are deaf or hard of hearing.

So, what gives?

A few theories. One is the proliferation of shows, thanks to the globalization of streaming, that are either in different languages or feature actors with thick accents. Another is the fact that actors don’t over-enunciate like they used to, instead opting for a more natural — and more mumbly — delivery.

But it’s also very likely that more Gen Z viewers are also doing something else while watching TV. As one Gen Zer told the Telegraph, “The main reason they do it is so they can flick their eyes up and read ahead, then take in the whole scene quickly, and look back down at their phone, or whatever second screen they have.”

The latest season of the Netflix sci-fi/horror drama Stranger Things, which came out in May, really leaned into its captioning, adding all sorts of memeable onscreen, non-dialogue descriptions — there was a lot of “squelching wetly” this season. As my colleague Jill Wilson pointed out, these vividly rendered captions aren’t just valuable to double-screening Gen Zs; they also add a dimension to the storytelling for those who need captions because they are hard of hearing.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com