Hooray, I thought. There’s a new season of The Tourist. I remember liking that, I thought. It was that thing with the bloke in Australia, wasn’t it? And I was all set to settle down for a good binge, when I realised that I had almost literally no idea what had happened in the first season. This is a personal grumble, but I’d bet dollars to donuts I’m not the only one in this position.
One thing I knew is, it was confusing. There was a bloke in, yes, Australia, who had had a bump on the head and didn’t know who he was, except he was Jamie Dornan. I remember there was a bit with some LSD, and recalling the plot was quite like that too. Someone was trying to blow him up (or maybe he was trying to blow someone else up). He made friends with a sensible but troubled policewoman and a sexy waitress who seems to have known him in a past life. There was a vicious gangster who had a brother who didn’t exist but then did, or something. And a suitcase. Was that important? There was someone called Lena Pascal, who was very important but I had no idea why. And at the end: did Jamie Dornan…turn out to be a baddie? Or was he dead? Nope, it’s gone.
Streaming services discovered that if you give the public a story all at once, lots of people will gollop it up in one mighty binge
All I have is a selection of random images and half-connections. As a result, I don’t quite dare to start watching the new season because it will be actively annoying to not be able to remember what’s going on. Wikipedia plot summaries – way ahead of you there – really aren’t much help either. In fact, the only way to properly enjoy season two of The Tourist, at this stage, will be to re-watch season one; and I liked it, but I didn’t like it that bloody much. Certainly not enough to spend eight or nine hours going, ‘ah, yes, I remember’, or ‘gosh, I’ve just recalled the imminent plot twist so this episode is really dragging’, or ‘oh, it’s him again! Hello!’
Even should any of us have the patience for that, we’ll end up in a Tristram Shandy style time paradox. One year, you spend ten hours watching a ten-episode series. The following year, you spend 20 hours catching up on season one and watching season two. The following year, it’s thirty hours catching up on two seasons and watching the new one. Then 40. At some point, watching your favourite telly shows would consume more time than you had available to do everything else like, for instance, eating or tying your shoelaces. Eventually, especially if Star Trek is your thing, a single human lifetime will not be long enough to watch the new season of your favourite show properly.
This worsening problem is a symptom of the way we consume entertainment now: binge and purge. Streaming services discovered a couple of decades back that if you give the public a story all at once, lots of people will gollop it up in one mighty binge, like a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant. ‘ZOMG the new season of Vile Bananas just dropped!’ (or some such nonsense) will ping to every smartphone in the land. And up and down the country, Vile Bananas enjoyers will draw the curtains in the front room and vanish from the busy world, emerging a full day later pale of skin, with the red-rimmed eyes of the determined self-abuser, and whiffing ever so slightly of Dr Oetker’s frozen pizza.
Why this is more profitable than the traditional once-a-week model to the streaming companies, I have no idea. But there it is: that’s how a great deal of telly is now made and intended to be consumed. I don’t dispute that it offers great artistic opportunities: if you know your audience is watching the episodes in very close succession, they won’t need spoon-feeding recaps of what happened last week. You can plot more intricately. You can be subtle with your foreshadowing. You can trust the audience to keep a complex cast of major and minor characters in mind.
But it also presents a practical problem far more acute than we’ve faced in this area before. Television is faster and faster to consume, but – as production values continue to rise, and the complexity of its acting and writing becomes ever greater – it is slower and slower to make. There’s always going to be a pause in between seasons, even for the shows that can be sure of being recommissioned. That pause can be many months, and sometimes even a couple of years.
Because of that pause, it’s exactly those things that were virtues in the show while the audience was fully immersed – clever plots, wicked switchbacks, multiple timelines, large casts – that become an active bar to entry when the audience hasn’t thought about it for a year or more. That audience’s brain has since been digesting another season of Succession, or Ozark, or The Bear. The mental blackboard of its short-term memory has had any number of manic-Carrie-Matheson diagrams scribbled over it and re-erased since then.
Middle-aged farts like me come to a show we enjoyed and have little or no idea who the characters even are. Was that one the cousin? Is this one secretly working for Citadel? Did Koriandr go home last season or was that the one where Robin was being a baddy? We might wonder where one character has gone, and only three episodes in remember (or Google) that they died. I remember physically sinking my teeth into a sofa-cushion with rage when The Diplomat, a schlocky but very enjoyable thriller, ended on a cliffhanger leaving a whole tapestry of loose ends. That was back in April. There’s going to be a second season, apparently, but as yet there’s not even a rumour of a release date. The brilliant, little noticed speculative fiction series Severance, which was even more complicated, came out in February 2022: second season currently slated – with a bit of luck – for some time this year.
It’s even happening on the big screen. Remember when movies were self-contained? Not any longer. I practically sent my popcorn skyward when, having nursed my not-what-it-once-was bladder through what felt like four hours of Avengers: Infinity War without a pee-break, the bloody thing ended on a to-be-continued. Half the universe disappeared, and we had to wait – two years, was it? – for Avengers: Endgame to find out which half and whether they’d come back, by which stage the sense of urgency had rather worn off. If I’d been over eighty I’d have asked for my money back at the box office as having represented a bad bet on my own longevity. Same thing with the latest Spider Man: Across the Spiderverse. And the new Mission: Impossible. I guarantee you not one soul watching the sequel to either of those movies will remember what happened in the previous one by the time it comes out.
I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but we’re going to need one. Because these days, watching telly or going to the pictures isn’t all that much different from waking up in the Australian outback having had a serious bump to the head, and wondering what all these disconnected memories in your head add up to. Only without having Jamie Dornan’s brooding good looks or a sexy waitress for company.
Comments