This weekend HBO Go crashed during the premiere of Game of Thrones’ fourth season, the second time in as many months.
The outage was comparatively short and the company kept active on its Twitter account to inform viewers of alternative ways they could watch the show—from cable on-demand to rebroadcasts later that night. It was a strangely antiquated few hours, one of the few remaining instances of shared culture that depends on one single source for distribution. And when that source proved faulty, a great sense of helplessness emerged alongside a self-consciousness about how much distance lies between us and our entertainment.
Seeing the despair and uncertainty sweep across Twitter and Facebook as the fictional refuge of Game of Thrones failed to materialize on time felt like a scene that might have come from a reality show. I have long preferred reality television to scripted drama. Reality shows are as fake as anything else on television, and their inauthenticity makes the moments of genuine emotion and unsophisticated honesty more powerful. Reality shows call into question both our fantasy narratives and the media created to transmit them.
The scripted drama is only ever an allegory or morality play, teasing at the canned scandals and political debates we have been told are important. There is nothing to discover in Game of Thrones each week, but we ride along with everyone else in the manufactured drama that surrounds each new episode, revealing a betrayal, murder, naked body, or baby dragon fluttering through the frame and then attempt to analyze it all after the fact.
Yet it always feels like we have heard these stories before. We have seen these allegories spin themselves out across seasons and come to the end of the series to learn that there was never a satisfying answer to be had in the first place.
Seeing the despair and uncertainty sweep across Twitter and Facebook as the fictional refuge of Game of Thrones failed to materialize on time felt like a scene that might have come from a reality show. I have long preferred reality television to scripted drama. Reality shows are as fake as anything else on television, and their inauthenticity makes the moments of genuine emotion and unsophisticated honesty more powerful.
“We’re in the business of creating addicts,” HBO CEO Richard Plepler said in an interview with BuzzFeed earlier this year. It’s been said that television has entered a new golden age with the advent of shows like Game of Thrones, The Wire, The Sopranos, Downton Abbey, Mad Men, Breaking Bad—which have transformed the one-time vehicle for selling breakfast cereal and dish soap into a high art. The idea of quality itself—the highness we attach to our diversions—has become an enabler for compulsive consumption that leaves us using social pressure to encourage as many people as possible participate in that consumption.
The more people there are watching, the more important the show seems, its impression of artistry growing higher and more impressive with each new review, recap, or happy hour conversation. Like the intercut narrations of reality show performers adding dramatic context to the random scraps of footage from The Real World or The Bachelor, the growing reverence for the art of scripted television is a bizarre kind of mass performance that we are all being drawn into, comforted by the fact that we can be part of a conversation about something important. And though we couldn’t choose what subject is ultimately deemed important enough to talk about, we do get to have opinions about it.
I was born into one of the last generations to watch television without the coercive aura of social media. Time spent with television always felt like time spent away from other people. A night watching Golden Girls on Saturday night during high school was a night I didn’t get invited to any parties, and when a new episode of ER played it was an hour when my mother could make the whole house shut up.
Television in the 80s and 90s was still self-aggrandizing and intrusive, but it was also incredibly lonesome. The unreality of those shows was less in the hairstyles or easily resolved plot lines, but in the presence of a machine in our homes that was animated from outside.
Now that we access these portals into the unreal over the Internet alongside the social networks, our allegiance to television is starting to drive how we socialize, from tribal prejudices against the type of person who could watch a particular show, to deepening bonds between fans of House Lannister, all who take comfort in the shared bond of addiction.
It’s easier to make peace with their inescapability, because even in the few unexpected moments when technical failures interrupt our access we start to seem like strangers to one another, and so we turn again to the dramatic reference points we’ve been given and try to understand what they mean to tell us, ignoring the fact that we already know the answer. Like anything else that’s driven by addiction, the only message is “don’t stop.”
Michael Thomsen is Complex's tech columnist. He has written for Slate, The Atlantic, The New Inquiry, NewYorker.com, Billboard, and is author of Levitate the Primate: Handjobs, Internet Dating, and Other Issues for Men. He tweets often at @mike_thomsen.
