What’s The Point of Watching A TV Show When The Internet Already Did It?
Ah, yes, another TV show coming to an end. Fans are already planning finale watch parties, writing up posts like a eulogy for the show, about how it changed their lives, and how they are not ready to say goodbye to the show yet.
And then there are people who know the show only through viral clips and fan edits. While the serious fans wait for the finale, the rest of us are just waiting for the screenshots and recap gifs.
Because why actually watch a show when the fans are out there creating these convenient, bite-sized clips that give away the gist of what is going on anyway?
Let’s face it, most TV shows are at least 45 minutes long. While streaming services used to initially drop entire seasons at once, they have decided to borrow cable’s annoying strategy of dropping episodes on a weekly basis. Some are worse. They drop only one part of the season and then expect fans to wait an entire month before they drop part two.
This is some serious commitment to make, and not at all for those who are commitment-phobes. Forget human relationships, now entertainment is demanding commitment from us?
Just like any relationship, it’s hard to know within the first few minutes/dates/weeks whether this is worth investing time and money into. Yes, if you’re paying for the subscription and snacks to go with the TV show, then you are investing money into this as well.
But the advantage of TV shows is that you can find reviews and fan edits all over the internet to make an informed decision. Do the characters have chemistry? Are they funny enough or relatable? Are you intrigued by it?
The first thing that sells is the cast chemistry, of course. Sometimes these clips can convert viewers into fans and drive them to watch the show. And that usually happens when the chemistry is so good, and the fan edit has used the appropriate music in the background that does the trick.
But even if the fan edit clips are good, not all of us want to convert to viewers. It’s usually because if the show is 45 minutes, the entire episode is obviously not based on your favorite couple. There are a lot of subplots, emotional drama about characters you haven’t seen clips of yet, and montages that hardly contribute to the main plot.
But fans of the show usually curate the best scenes of the series and compile them into a short that tells the story much more effectively. We don’t need to watch entire seasons and sit through filler episodes when the fans have already done that for us. Thank you, fans.
So what is the point of watching the entire show? It’s great for those who want to fully immerse themselves in the story and understand every aspect of the characters and their motivations. A brief clip isn’t going to explain what the character had to go through in the past and why they are behaving like this now.
For others, who are not ready to commit yet, or waiting for the entire series to drop so they can binge instead of being rationed out episodes, we are grateful for the fan edits.
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