The Rise of Hate-Watching: Which TV shows do you love to despise?
We are living in one of the great periods in TV history. The last decade saw the expansion of the cable universe and the popular rise of serialized shows, a pair of major evolutionary changes that pushed the boundaries of the medium. A show’s protagonist no longer had to be a good guy, or even particularly likable. Storylines could run for months, or years. The Internet provided the foundation for a hyper-attentive new strain of TV fandom. We began to talk about TV shows the way that people in the ’70s talked about movies, or the way that people in the ’20s talked about literature. Shows like Sopranos, Arrested Development, Mad Men, and The Wire had set a new benchmark. A host of new TV shows arrived, shows with sky-high ambition, shows that wanted to be great.
And then some of those shows turned out to be terrible.
This is the story that led, at least in part, to the rise of “Hate-Watching” — the practice of watching a TV show that you know is bad, for the specific purpose of enjoying that badness.
