I’m not sure if I am even legally allowed to say this while covering for a light and breezy weekly culture newsletter, but: O, am I tired of culture! There’s just too much of it, from too many angles, all of the time. If there isn’t a new TV show dropping on one of the countless ‘pluffixed’ platforms Gwilym wrote about last week, then there’s a must-see film in cinemas, or a two-hour podcast I have to listen to entirely then have an opinion on. This is how culturally saturated I am: it wasn’t until the second draft of this paragraph that I even remembered the concept of music. Albums! Songs! Dance trends! It’s exhausting! No wonder the Grammy committee heard 50 seconds of a Harry Styles song on TikTok and just went: “You know what? Give him album of the year.”
A new trick I have pioneered, then, is consuming outside of the hype cycle. I mainly do this with TV but you can do it with whatever, really. Recently – as in, over the long dying weeks of Dry January – I slowly meandered through three of last year’s biggest and most talked-about TV series, cut shorn of the context of time-sensitive hype: Severance, Bad Sisters, and the last two half-series of Better Call Saul. I also watched the entirety of Euphoria at a time when no one was tweeting about it or doing memes about it on Instagram, which was its own interesting personal experiment – it turns out I have already seen every single frame of Euphoria in a screenshot, but I have never seen them joined together and sped up in what the industry calls “footage”.
