Is It Possible to Just Watch a Show...

and not engage with any of the internet fandom around it?

When House of the Dragon premiered a couple of years ago, I wasn’t particularly interested in it. I enjoyed Game of Thrones a lot, but the Targaryens have always been my least-favorite house. The obsession with their own specialness. The incest. It just never interested me. I’m a Stark girl through and through.

So the whole premise of House of the Dragon sounded like an annoying snore. Targs! Petty machinations! More incest!

But with the second season starting up again this summer, I started to get the itch for some fantasy TV. I have been watching less and less television over the past eighteen months, partly by choice, but also partly because nothing has caught my interest. And yet, suddenly, I was getting slightly interested in House of D. If we got the DVDs from the library, we wouldn’t even have to pay for an HBO Max subscription… And if it wasn’t very good, well, this was just a bit of summer escapism. I wasn’t expecting much, and if not much came of it, then good.

The first season of House of the Dragon is better than I expected, but mostly because I had very low expectations. It’s a perfectly decent show if a little boring and annoying at times. But man, I HAVE been jonesing for some fantasy on my TV screen! It’s funny how some dragons, knights in armor, and British people hanging out in castles can make me happy. Even if I sort of hate both the Greens and the Blacks, it’s fun just watching fantasy characters doing stuff in a fantasy world. I didn’t realize how much I missed that.

I didn’t intend to at first, but after the first couple of episodes, I realized that if I tried reading anything on the internet about the first season, I might inadvertently read or see some spoilers for the second season (or later first-season eps). So, instead of hopping onto Reddit or some other pop culture website, I opted to avoid the internet conversation around the show. I talked about it with my husband (he and I are watching together). I texted my cousin, who has already seen season one but who knows not to spoil anything. And that’s it. No social media. No recaps or podcasts.

What was at first an attempt to avoid spoilers slowly became a more intentional avoidance of all internet-based conversation around the show. I remembered when House of D first premiered, and how Rings of Power premiered soon after, and I remember all the internet firestorm around Rings of Power, the trolls and bad-faith arguments about Rings’s “wokeness,” and I was VERY online during that period, looking for opinions on the internet that matched and confirmed my own. I remember how one of the media narratives was that Rings was an inferior show to House of the Dragons. That annoyed me at the time (since I really loved Rings). But now?

I’m still annoyed.

I’m annoyed because I think Rings of Power is still the better show, but I’m also annoyed about the media and internet “conversation” that took place in relation to the two shows. That conversation wasn’t very helpful to either of the shows nor to the experience as an audience member. It felt like instead of simply enjoying a few hours’ entertainment, we had to be constantly defending or attacking, analyzing differences or making comparisons.

And I started thinking: What if our television just existed as entertainment? As art? What if we didn’t constantly engage in digital conversations around these shows but just watched them and maybe chatted about them with friends and family in our day-to-day lives? What if our impressions and opinions about these shows were simply our own and not colored by the “larger conversation” swirling around them?

I’m not saying this internet conversation can’t be fun. It can be immensely fun! For some of us, the larger internet convo IS the fun. Being part of the “fandom” can be fun. Speculating, analyzing, reading and watching and listening to critics break things down, all of it can be fun.

But I can’t help thinking that when we spend so much of our time in this “conversation,” we end up putting too much weight onto the art itself. Yes, talking about TV shows or movies or books is wonderful, pleasurable, enlightening, enriching. But reading or watching or listening to the opinions of thousands of people about these shows and books, with no end in sight, with an ever-spawning cavalcade of new opinions, new threads, new podcasts, new debates, can end up crushing the experience of the art itself. It’s not the conversation: it’s where it’s happening, with whom, and how much. So, so much. An overwhelm of much.

I used to belong to a Tolkien message board way back before the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings even came out, and it was a wonderful community where we hashed out our ideas about all things Tolkien and Middle-Earth. I really loved it.

But at some point after the movies did come out, I realized that A.) this forum was sucking up a lot of my time and mental energy, and B.) it was often making me like the movies a little bit less. Not a lot, mind you, but enough to make it so that the experience of the movies was caught up in the experience of “talking” about the movies on the internet, and the talking-about-it experience started to take precedence.

I know that what I’m describing is basically fandom. Fandom in the age of the internet. Nothing new.

But with House of the Dragon, I’ve been intentionally avoiding fandom, and I have to say, it’s kind of wonderful. It’s hard at times too, because the old itch to see what other random strangers on the internet have to say about something is a strong pull, but I think I’m both enjoying the show more, and also less, which, it turns out, is a good thing. It’s a good thing to just enjoy something and not make it part of some larger commitment in your life. Sometimes being part of “the discourse” isn’t necessary. It isn’t worth it. It’s putting too much weight on the art itself, making it a big part of your life while diminishing it at the same time.

I’m torn about this realization, because I was thinking about doing recaps of season two of Rings of Power as part of this newsletter, but then would I be a hypocrite for saying, “Hey, maybe we need LESS online discourse around our shows!” and then contributing my own unasked-for thoughts to that discourse?

I’m not against all criticism or analysis of art. Both of those things can be good (and fun too). Criticism (meaning not necessarily negative criticism but simply analysis) can enlighten. It can draw out shades of meaning and technique we might not have noticed on our own. It can establish broader contexts and cultural histories we might not have been aware of.

But it’s not necessary to enjoying art. It’s a fun, (sometimes) enlightening experience—both for the writer of said criticism and the readers—but it’s an add-on. It’s a thing we do to help ourselves understand something difficult or confusing; to find like-minded people who have all the “right” opinions (AKA the opinions that agree with our own); to deepen and extend the enjoyable experience of the artwork itself. Sometimes a work of criticism introduces us to something new and opens our eyes to a work of art we might not otherwise have encountered (this is often my favorite form of criticism).

And yeah, sometimes we engage in the “discourse” because someone somewhere is wrong on the internet and we want to defend what’s right (AKA our own irrefutable opinions on the matter). We join the conversation to make arguments for (or against) a work of art, and that can be fun.

Sometimes.

With diminishing returns.

Until it gets exhausting and diminishes the actual artwork—you know, the thing that we loved so much that we jumped on the internet in the first place to “talk” about it with total strangers.

Professional criticism, the internet discourse, whatever you want to call it can be fun. Professional criticism, in particular, can introduce us to new ways of thinking, new interpretations. It can introduce us to new works of art. It can sharpen our own enjoyment of something and all the future somethings we enjoy simply by helping us deepen our critical faculties.

But the internet discourse about nearly everything is so massive these days, so voluminous, that we can get sucked into a lot of stuff that doesn’t enhance our experience. It can overwhelm—overtake, in fact—our experience. Fandom becomes about the fandom not about the thing we’re all fans of.

Anyway, this is my long justification for deciding to skip the discourse around House of the Dragon. I’m also going to skip going on the internet for the second season of Rings of Power. I’m not going to read what strangers online think about these shows. I’m not even going to read what professional, astute, and perceptive professional critics of the show are going to write about the show. It’s not that their writing is bad or useless or whatever. I don’t believe that. I’m sure much of the internet conversation is very good. I’m not against criticism (see above).

But for these shows, for this moment in my life, I’m going to go back to what I (and millions of other people who enjoyed TV back in the day) used to do: I’m going to watch my shows, form my own opinions, and talk about them with the real people in my life who watch them too. My friends and family. The people I see face-to-face.

When I was in high school, my friends and I all watched Seinfeld every Thursday night, and we’d come into school the next day and reminisce about the episode, retell our favorite jokes and moments, and generally critique and compare it to previous episodes and to the show as a whole. We had enormous fun talking to each other about Seinfeld. We didn’t always agree, but for the most part, we looked for commonalities and points of agreement so that we could all enjoy the conversation.

It’s the proverbial water cooler, but before it became a digital “space,” the metaphorical water cooler for me and my friends was the band room before class started.

Now, as I’m watching these new fantasy series on TV, the water cooler is the couch where my husband and I trade our thoughts on the shows. It’s the dining room table when my cousin comes over for dinner. It’s my parents’ house where I chat up my brother and sister-in-law about HotD. It’s the teacher’s lounge where I ask a co-worker if he thinks season two is better than season one, and oh, by the way, are you going to watch season two of Rings of Power?

That’s all the discourse I want at the moment.

And in my experiment with watching House of the Dragon and staying off the internet, I have to say, I couldn’t be happier. I’ve avoided drama, group-think, all the meta-narratives and behind-the-scenes stuff that is superfluous to enjoying the actual as-written, filmed show. I’ve gotten to enjoy it for what it is. A TV show. Not an all-consuming addiction. Not something I have to scroll through endless fan comments to enjoy. Not something I have to have a strong opinion about. Not something I need to critique. Just a show. A pretty decent show. A show I can chat up my husband about, and together on the couch we can compare it to other shows and critique it on our own terms.

See, when Rings of Power and HotD first came out, prior to the writers’ strike, I was involved heavily in reading the “discourse.” I was listening to podcasts. I was caught up in defending the Rings from detractors. It was a totalizing experience.

In some ways, I miss my mid-morning walks listening to the Ringer podcast as they talked about the show. It was beautiful late August/early September, I was working from home as a freelancer, and I was living the life I had always dreamed of living. Listening to a podcast about a Tolkien-inspired LOTR spinoff show, getting hyped and pumped for each new episode, reading spoilers and then reading critiques of the spoilers, and on and on and on. It was exhilarating at the time, but looking back, it wasn’t very healthy.

And I don’t think I enjoyed the show all that much more by doing all that “engaging” with content. I wasn’t enjoying the show; I was getting caught up in para-show elements, but they weren’t the show. They were something else. Something I’m not interested in participating in this time around.

This time (and perhaps for the near-future), I’m much more content having my own thoughts and talking about it with a small circle of friends. I’ve put the show (maybe all shows going forward) in its proper place.

I don’t want the fandom or discourse around a work of art to overwhelm or subsume my experience of the work of art itself. As such, I’m trying to watch TV (and movies and books and maybe a lot of other things) without having to rush to the internet as soon as the credits roll.

As it turns out, House of the Dragon is still an enjoyable experience without the internet as a forum for conversation. It might even be a more enjoyable experience without it.

I’m not going to commit to never writing another word of art criticism again. After all (see above), I do really like criticism.

But I don’t need to spend more time with the criticism and the “conversation” online than with the thing itself. It turns out, when you watch a TV show and then go to bed afterward, without switching on your ipad or phone to read what the fandom thinks, it’s a pretty great experience. It’s a wonderful experience, in fact.

I’ve decided not to recap Rings of Power season two. I might write about it (and HotD) at some point, but only after time has passed, after I’ve had a chance to simply enjoy it and let it be what it wants to be: a TV show. Not grist for the internet mill. Not something I need to have an immediate opinion about. Not a topic for the discourse.

Just a TV show that entertains and enlightens and stirs my imagination. A good time. And if I want to chat about it, I’ll talk to my family and friends. On the couch or at the dining room table or in the teacher’s lounge.

And it’ll be great.

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Blog Posts of Interest

I’ve been doing a lot of writing about writing lately. Process stuff. Notebooks and habits and goals.

In late July I reflected on my use of pocket notebooks, and then earlier this month I challenged myself (actually, it was my husband’s idea) to make something everyday (not going so well…), and then this past week I’ve been trying to live out the Rules from the Immaculate Heart College Art Department under the direction of Corita Kent. This week’s rule is, “Find a place to trust and trying trusting it for a while.”

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An Update of Sorts

You might have noticed that I completely missed sending out any newsletters during the month of August. This was due to my teaching job; the new school year began in August, and with the advent of a new year, my time for writing has diminished. I enjoy teaching, but I’ll admit: I get the blues when summer ends and work begins and my time for writing and creating is curtailed. I’m trying to make peace with it (as I seem to do every year), but it’s been hard, and I find that instead of using my free time as writing time, I’ve fallen into a funk and gone into the dark corners of my mind, muttering, “What’s the point?” over and over again instead of, you know, writing stuff.

I’m sure many of us have passions and pursuits we want to do more of, but time and energy are in short supply, and I wish I had advice to give that would help square this circle, but alas, I do not. I do know that it helps to be gentle on oneself and to keep going, even if it’s just a little bit of creative work each day. That’s where I’m at right now.

If that’s where you’re at right now too, hold fast. Even the smallest creative act can be regenerative. Just a few sentences written, one sketch made, a chord or two strummed together. All of it eventually adds up to a creative life.

A few of my students this year started a Creativity Club, and every week I’m inspired by their enthusiasm and positivity. The goal of Creativity Club is to encourage and support everyone as they strive to do their art, no matter how small the creative act. We’re very loose about the definition of “making stuff,” and very loose in defining what’s creative. That’s the beauty of the club. We work, we play, we mess around and see what happens. It’s super chill.

Even if my own creative efforts have been a little slim these days, it’s been fantastic watching this club take off. It reminds me to go easy on myself and have fun. So here’s a little shout-out to my Creativity Club scenius!

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That’s it for now. As always, thank you for reading!

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