More than any other entertainment medium,* the way we interact with television has changed the most in my lifetime. It used to be that our lives were structured around the TV. If you cared about a show enough to keep up with it, you had three options.
*A good argument could be made for video games. I might respond that even as the games themselves have taken massive leaps, the way we orient ourselves to video games has stayed much the same, with the clear exception of online gaming. Not being an online gamer, I'm not in a position to compare. Though it's interesting that in both cases (online games and streaming television) the new factor is the internet.
1. Make sure your schedule was clear every ___________ night at __ o'clock.
2. Finagle with your VCR with the hopes of recording the episode on a VHS.
3. Hope like hell you could catch the missed episode in a re-run.
Television lent itself to tradition. Families like mine set aside sacred time every week to watch the new episode of Survivor or CSI. People squirreled away tapes of their favorite shows collected over the course of months, like I did with The Simpsons and Spider-Man: The Animated Series. Folks surrendered their fates to unpredictable re-runs, maybe a previously unexperienced morsel of entertainment, maybe a purgatory of that one episode you've seen half a dozen times and then some.
The Netflix model changed everything. Of course it had its precursors in TiVo and other digital recording services, but the sea change happened with Netflix. It killed the video stores.
Netflix, and streaming television in general, gave television viewers what filmgoers had for years: agency. No longer do we have to respect the sacred space-time of a regularly scheduled program. Instead, television bends to our individual humanistic whims. Sneaking bits and pieces of TV on public transportation or binging a show in the middle of the night, we have profaned television with our vulgar desires.
I like it a lot better that way.
