Social Media and TV

A never-ending cycle

By: Naomi Nickel

In 2010, 216 scripted TV shows premiered. Sounds like a lot, right? And yet, in 2019, 532 premiered—double the amount in just 9 years, largely thanks to streaming companies producing original content. It is impossible to keep up with all of the latest shows, movies, and music. And even watching only the biggest hits feels like a time-consuming obligation.

This overwhelming amount of content means the trend cycles for shows are shrinking at a rapid pace. When a new Netflix show drops, millions of people watch it within a couple of days, and everyone else scrambles to finish it and join the conversation before it gets old. While it can be exciting to consume content right as it comes out, feeling like you are in the know and giving your takes on the best “Squid Game” characters, this rapid cycle quickly becomes exhausting. Binging every popular show quickly becomes mindless and leaves little time to digest what you watched. As a result, most people’s opinions on popular shows are swayed by surface-level interpretations on social media, and, soon enough, they all sound exactly the same.

But is there a way out? The answer is yes—but you will have to make sacrifices. If you spend most of your free time on social media, not watching the next “Stranger Things” will leave you feeling very left out, which can be difficult, considering how much we rely on social media for validation and social interaction. Learn to be okay with those feelings. Stop caring about keeping up with the trends. If you have no idea what people are tweeting about, get off of Twitter. If someone asks how you felt about the latest show, say you haven’t watched it and find something else you have in common. Spending your time doing things that you truly enjoy will always be more worthwhile than staying up to finish a series as fast as you can. And if you ever feel really left out, just remember: in a week, everyone will have moved on and forgotten the show ever existed. If you find things that you love to do, you won’t even feel left out.

With new hit shows every month, save your time and don’t watch what you won’t enjoy.