How recaps changed the way we think about TV – and our lives

Barrels of virtual ink have been spilled on the Golden Age of Television, and the time has come to take stock of its poor relation, the Bronze Age of Television Criticism. Yes, there are more ambitious and complex shows than ever before. As television has come to be recognized as a legitimately artistic medium, viewers have been challenged to rise to the occasion – to meet those ambitions with a level of savviness and interpretive skill that wasn’t required when we could relax into the laugh tracks. If in the past we trusted television to direct our reactions, many new shows are coy, even secretive. Prestige TV is a phenomenon now, and its new maneuvers are harder to chart, morally as well as narratively.

That means some of its events are less easily named. Enter the Bronze Age of TV criticism, which tries to name them. It asks questions such as: What did the anal sex scene between Mindy and Danny on The Mindy Project actually show us? Was that scene between Cersei and Jaime in Game of Thrones rape?

You’ll notice that these questions aren’t actually about television or plot; they’re about ethics and consent. The bulk of our TV writing has as much to do with what TV means as what it does. More and more, the way we process the show transcends the bounds of its limited universe. That’s not to say that TV is new to controversy –
Roseanne and Ellen were challenging social mores years ago. But there’s a difference worth tracking, and it’s partly to do with TV’s more literary ambitions, and partly the extent to which, these days, we’ve turned to TV as a common text that we can all analyse and use to generate social meaning.

The verdict among critics and viewers was near-unanimous in the aftermath of that Game of Thrones scene. Yes, most said that was clearly a rape. When showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss and director Alex Graves claimed, after the episode aired, that it was not a rape, it changed nothing for viewers. As presented, the scene showed a rape, and – insofar as the public interpretation of that scene could be measured – a rape it remained.

That’s fascinating. That fans’ and critics’ interpretation of what happened departed so dramatically from the director’s – and that the difference persisted even after the creators weighed in – testifies to how robust these analytical communities have become. It shows, too, how broad a role television has come to play in our ethical conversations, and the extent to which those conversations spontaneously develop around usefully fictional events.

I say “usefully fictional” for a reason: there’s a refreshing equality of access to information on a TV show. If the extraordinarily disparate coverage of Michael Brown’s life and death proves anything, it’s that there are several different angles from which to tell a “true” story, and that the public trusts none of them. A real event has a complexity that can, at least in principle, alter whatever surface we see. For those who prefer not to acknowledge police wrongdoing in the shootings of unarmed teenagers – or who prefer to think women who say they were raped or abused are liars – it’s always possible to claim that there’s some secret evidence we haven’t seen. “There are two sides to every story,” these people say, mistaking dismissal for objectivity. “We don’t have all the facts.”

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Our real-life ethical debates tend to bottom out at this point – the point at which, despite living in the information age, we can claim in Facebook threads that the truth is fundamentally unknowable. We no longer believe that we as a society share a common text. There was a time when we all read more or less the same news. That’s no longer the case; newspapers are dying, media diets differ radically depending on political affiliation, and the 24-hour news cycle has eroded journalistic filters and the public trust. There’s deep scepticism about what “the media” tells us, or doesn’t. Reality doesn’t bite anymore, it bends; this makes ethical debates based on real-life events so unstable that they’re almost meaningless. With a camera absent, we can’t even agree on the basics: was Michael Brown shot from 35 feet away or next to the police car?

Television, by contrast, is refreshingly concrete. We all have direct access to the same information, and so we can discuss what constitutes consent untroubled by hypotheticals about whether Cersei was drinking or changed her mind the next day. The fact that Game of Thrones is fiction means, ironically enough, that it feels unmediated. We aren’t reliant on a mythical agenda-wielding intermediary (a journalist, say, or a woman) and can instead witness the event in question “directly”.

If this turn away from real events toward story in the pursuit of ethical truth sounds almost religious, it should. It’s peculiarly Protestant and American. The Reformation was also a turn away from the meddling and potentially corrupt intermediary that stood between believers and the truth: no more priests! No more filters. The believer’s relationship to scripture should be direct. Read the text yourself, listen to the minister, then decide together, as a community, what it all means.

We may not be a churchgoing public anymore, but there remains a deep hunger for sustained, ethical, collective conversation. We are lonely. We long for a public square. But there are other aspects to our national character, such as it is: we are intellectually lazy. We fear politics. We have been shaped by centuries of Bible study. It’s no surprise that TV analysis appeals. There aren’t many situations in a post-religious society where a group of people passionately invested in a story can gather on a weekly basis to discuss its ramifications for how we live today. But it’s happening: as of this writing, one AV Club essay on True Detective has 1,135 comments, a hefty portion of which wonder whether the show allows women meaningful participation. Another significant percentage debates whether that should even be a concern and whether a particular narrative has a larger social responsibility.

These are important questions. If TV criticism is one of the most popular genres, it’s in large part because it’s an interactive and apparently innocent endeavour. Its sheer frivolity is enabling; the comment sections often amount to a referendum not just on aesthetics and plot, but on right and wrong. It’s no secret that Americans have a dysfunctional relationship to leisure; it’s an unfortunate truth about our culture that we can only debate things that matter deeply when we think we’re wasting time.

In other words, TV criticism is popular because its subject is beloved but apparently unimportant. The stakes of the recap are so minimal that it accidentally becomes the innocuous ground on which ethical conversions can happen. “Whatever sensitivity I have,” writes the AV Club’s Eric Thurm, “is mostly the result of repeated engagement with that kind of writing, and an attempt to reconcile ‘my’ version of the episode with someone else’s. That’s especially true for things like the treatment of gender/sexual assault, which I don’t think I would have even understood how to watch for if I hadn’t read a lot of really smart people talking about why certain storylines do/don’t work.”

If TV is the new scripture, recaps are the new sermons. How did we develop this habit? How did we transform the review, which used to be a simple recommendation over whether you should watch something or not, into an essay? How did this become an essential part of our work as viewers?

I put this question to Twitter:

Some people cited intellectual curiosity: “Liberal arts education beat value of discussion into me. It allows me to think about it another way, in another dimension,” says Hannah Wood. Nicholas Ochiel finds it redemptive: “Reading good critique compensates for the mind-numbing rote of TV scripting, like a long jog after ice cream.” Many people said TV criticism helped them articulate the emotions they felt. Matt Pearce puts it beautifully: “It’s like a ceremony of elucidation for me, in which all the murmurations I could only sense are given proper names.”

Others admitted to reading criticism without watching the show: “I read criticism of GoT but don’t watch GoT. Is that weird?”

But the main reason people gave was social: an urge to confirm that one’s lonely experience of the show was shared. To check that one is still consuming one’s culture correctly, to collaborate, and (this was a big one) to feel sane, normal, emotionally and ethically less alone.

Siobhan Phillips wrote: “After anything I like I’m hungry for conversation – to test and hone my own reactions, thoughts, as well as to add to them. Part of the reason that watching good TV is so satisfying now is that there is more of that conversation available.”

Nitsuh Abebe said: “TV is an intense voyeuristic experience, watching others be social; discussing after helps resolve that.”

The TV recap grew up into the TV essay, and it has led to a new style of TV consumption that’s analytical, aesthetic, active and social. We may still be couch potatoes, but we’re interested couch potatoes, invested in finding not just entertainment but meaning and community in the viewing experience – and the conversation about that experience.

Rachel Cote: “Yes, it’s about intimacy for me too. I invest such emotion into shows that I need to channel it & foster closeness.”

My favorite insight was Sasha Geffen’s: “All reality is social; conferring after experiencing new stimulus helps establish a new agreed-upon reality.”

There’s something awe-inspiringly grand about that last formulation, and not just because it equates the social value of fictional experience to real experience. Even if we can’t know whether my blue is your blue, it’s useful to note the shape our desire to name blue has taken – and to realize that our entertainment, our unproductive leisure, isn’t just wasted time but an opportunity to redefine our terms. We may not be shaping reality together by comparing TV notes – it’s hard to think of a less direct form of political action – but we are rehearsing our collective understanding of what reality should be and, perhaps more importantly, debating how reality should be interpreted. There is a small but subversive value in coming up with a consensus truth we can trust, however much it might differ from what the creators, directors, showrunners (or founding fathers) intended.

It was a rape.