In catching up on my obscene trail of television newsletters this week, I was reminded again of our unfortunate reality: loss. The cycle of another series being removed from a platform, and a platform absolved to become another, and so on, continues to eat itself into existence, and a line on my “consumption_series” spreadsheet is lost from the opportunity to be completed. Unless I decide to pay the low price of $1.99 for every episode, shows like Showtimes’ Super Pumped and HBO’s F-Boy Island will remain unfinished. As a result, announcements like Arrested Development’s imminent removal from Netflix as a complete series make me anxious. Teetering between watching episodes here and there is no longer good enough and I have to finish, possibly from the beginning, all seasons of the show before I lose them forever.
Naturally, I’m sure you’re all thinking: you don’t have to. But what are your responses to something leaving a streaming service soon? “I gotta watch that” is casual for some, and we say it every day when recommendations are floating in conversation, but it’s different when something may otherwise be gone behind a paywall or an unnecessarily virus-y third party. As often brought up in class discussion, keeping up to date with series has enough accompanying challenges and anxieties; going back into the vault of ‘almost finished’ is no different and maybe even worse. Maybe it’s the modern equivalent of organizing your friend group to see a movie that has it’s final Regal showing an hour after school lets out in the middle of the week and the local bus will only drop you off with four minutes to spare between buying tickets and the CocaCola bear’s growl to silence all cell phones. It’s complicated, people are going to complain, but subconsciously there’s a shared awareness that this needs to be done for some greater reason.
As we’ve reflected and read this week on the circumstances of screens and screenings in our everyday realities, with reminders like this I can’t help but think of how we subconsciously create the parameters for these; of how every screening begins as a series of disorganized ideas that induce stress enough before you finally get to the moment when “okay, I gotta watch that now,” roots itself in the present time. Only now, without the complacency of a tv guide channel’s spontaneity, are these ideas somehow put into our heads by distributors at large?
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