They say that ancient civilisations celebrated significant televisual events by gathering around a plastic watering hole in a building known as an “office”. These so-called “water-cooler moments” were characterised by buzzy chatter, as colleagues chewed over what they’d seen on TV the night before. “Who shot JR?” they asked. “You can’t kill everyone at a wedding!” they cried. Tissues were passed around because “She got off the plane!.”
Today, there are too many streaming apps and too few days in the office for people to catch up in quite the same way. Instead, online forums dedicated to dissecting TV episodes are thriving: on Reddit, more than 776,000 people have joined a subreddit about The White Lotus, while 765,000 discuss everything that happens in Ben Stiller’s dystopian workplace thriller Severance. Like colleagues around a cooler, people praise their favourite characters and share theories about what will happen next. Unlike colleagues around a cooler, they also accuse each other of being stupid, bigoted and perverted.
