Is television getting stupider? In today’s entertainment industry, plummeting attention spans and disinterested viewers are being treated less like obstacles to overcome than market opportunities. Last week, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, promoting their new Netflix film The Rip, seemed to confirm what has long been rumoured about Netflix productions – that creators are explicitly advised to accommodate so-called “second-screen viewers”, those who treat TV as something to be half-watched while their foregrounds are preoccupied with Instagram, or TikTok, or a live-blog of the Brooklyn Beckham saga. Damon joked that Netflix had told him: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” He added: “It’s really going to start to infringe on telling stories.” Well, quite.
It’s hardly a big revelation: even if you hadn’t read the many reports over the past several years about the sort of creative impositions imposed on modern-day showrunners, it’s usually obvious just by watching the end product. You can sense it even in the streamer’s biggest shows, series like Wednesday and Stranger Things, and the recent Harlan Coben adaptation Run Away. It’d be foolish to dismiss every instance of repetitive dialogue, or clumsy exposition, as part of some grand, calculated strategy – but if you watch enough streaming fare, certain patterns invariably emerge. What’s more, it’s usually worse for TV than it is for film, with big-name movie directors often afforded a greater degree of control. The problem, of course, is for those people who aren’t filling out the NYT crossword while watching TV, but actually hoping to sit down and engage with a programme, either for its artistic merit or as pure escapism. For these viewers, needless reiteration makes for a dull and condescending spectacle.
