Umm... Did We Already Watch This?

One of the unanticipated artifacts of the streaming era, for me at least, is the way viewing stretches out in unpredictable and usually unwelcome directions. Several times now, I've started watching a show only to find that before I get to the end the rights have moved to another platform.

Since I'm usually subscribed to more than one streaming service at a time, if I'm lucky it's no more trouble than remembering where the show I was in the middle of watching has gone. Lucifer jumped from Amazon Prime to Netflix but since I was subscribing to both at the time, that wasn't much of a problem.

More often, though, the move is to a service I'm not using, which means making a choice between paying a further subscription just to keep watching or dropping the show, at least for the time being, in the hope it might eventually resurface on a service to which I have access. Or, if I really want to carry on watching, as happened in the case of Roswell New Mexico, using a VPN to find it on a platform outside my designated geographical territory.

There is sometimes another possibility, of course. In some ways it's my preferred option. That's to buy the damn thing on DVD. I'd add "Or on Blu-Ray" but I still don't own a Blu-Ray player. Every time I come close I remember I really don't care that much about the supposed visual fidelity and anyway isn't the whole physical format about to drop into the trash-bin of history?

Probably not, as it turns out. Back in the mid-teens, I was telling everyone who'd listen how the future wasn't just digital, it was virtual. No-one growing up in the 21st century would want to tie themselves down to a whole load of physical clutter, not when they could carry the entire history of cinema, literature and music in their pockets. 

Yeah. About that. Turns out I could not have been more wrong. Gen-Z flippin' love physical media. I don't have to read articles about it online. I can see it happening every day I go to work. Teens and twenty-somethings are all over the store, handling everything. They love to touch. 

They're the consumers driving the huge boom in exclusive editions, buying multiple variants of the same book just to have them all. They're the ones buying expensive hardbacks and gosh-wowing over the sprayed edges. 

 

It reminds me a little of the comic-book boom of the nineties, when publishers thought they could sell the same comic many times over just by issuing versions with different covers and packaging them in sealed plastic bags. The thing about that nasty little episode, though, was that most of the interest was fueled by greed. Comic fans believed if they bought all six different covers of the latest issue and never opened the sealed packages, all of them would increase in value as fast as the Flash could run.

Didn't happen. In fact, it didn't happen so much that the entire industry almost collapsed. It certainly drove me away from the hobby and from what I read afterwards, I was very much not the only one. 

This seems different. I hear so many conversations between customers as I move through the shop and not a single one has ever mentioned buying anything as an investment. They're all crazy in love with having something that looks great, that was written by someone whose writing they enjoy or which features characters they adore. There's a big collecting aspect to it, for sure, but mostly the drive seems to revolve around the sheer, physical, tactile, visual pleasure of seeing and touching something gorgeous.

Also, there's the permanence thing. A lot more people today seem to be aware that virtual ownership is ephemeral. A streaming subscription gives you unlimited access to what's on the stream but you have no say over what that is or how long it's going to be there. Even digital purchases only last as long as the service behind them and the hardware on which they run.

And it's a lot easier and more impressive to take a picture of yourself holding a book or a vinyl album to post on Instagram. It's harder to do the same with an eBook or a song you just found on Spotify. You can share your digital discoveries easily enough but bragging requires pictures.

Because, somewhat to my own surprise,  I am not utterly constrained by my previous belief systems, I, too, have modified my expectations concerning the digital future. I was pretty excited by it a decade ago, when the idea of being able to junk all my physical crap and replace it with orders of magnitude more convenient virtual crap seemed like an imminent reality.

Now I prefer to have hard copies of anything I really want to be sure I can come back to whenever I feel  like it. (The uncomfortable truth, that I probably never will come back to any of it, is something I prefer not to think about.) My problem is that, more often than you might expect, there is no physical media available for the stuff I want to keep.

Runaways is a good example. The show, produced by Marvel and originally released as a Hulu-exclusive, has, as far as I can tell, never been released in a physical format. I watched the first season some time ago, although I can't now remember which platform that was on. According to the production history on Wikipedia, it looks like it would have had to have been Disney+, to which I did subscribe for a while, but I thought I saw it earlier than that.

Wherever and wherever it was, I didn't finish the whole thing before it disappeared. Either I stopped subbing or it left the service. I'd be lying if I said I'd been pining to see the rest ever since but I did check if there was a box set I could buy. There was not. 

I hadn't thought about the show for a long while until a few weeks ago I spotted it in my Recommends on Prime. I was unexpectedly excited by the prospect of catching up with the show, most of whose characters I only vaguely remembered as "quite annoying". 

My never-reliable memory told me I'd seen the first two seasons so I started watching from the start of Season 3. I had no idea what the hell was going on. Sure, it'd been a while, but usually things like characters and plot come back to me very quickly, given a nudge. This time, nothing at all.

After half an hour of complete confusion I decided to go back to the start of Season 2 and start from there, which was just as well because I hadn't seen any of it before. It turns out I did not watch two seasons the first time around. I only watched the first. 

This post started out as a review of Season 2 of Runaways. That's not where it's going now. I will say that I think it's a very strong show, thematically absorbing, generally well-written and well-acted. As a superhero show it's a lot less superheroic than many and as a show ostensibly centered on teenagers, it has a lot more adult characters and adult-oriented content than you might expect. 

But I'll save a full review for when I've finished the third and final season. I'll be starting that tonight. It shouldn't take long. Towards the end of Season 2 I was enjoying it so much I was watching two episodes a night. Let's hope the final season is as compelling.

What I'm more interested highlighting just now is a more generalized observation on the increasing instability of my viewing options. 

I grew up in the era of broadcast television, before the general availability of any form of recording or time-shifting for home use. Until I was in my mid-20s, if I wanted to watch a TV show I had to make time to see it when it was shown.

If I missed that window, I might be lucky enough to catch it when it was repeated six months or a year later but you could never rely on something even getting a second showing. Many of them weren't even stored away safely by the broadcasters. They were treated as entirely disposable and taped over or thrown out with the trash.

 

What that meant was that if you really liked a show you made a point of being in when it came on. Barring accidents and emergencies, you would see every episode, in order, in one extended sequence that might take months. There'd usually be a week between episodes but most people could remember what happened a week ago pretty clearly. Continuity of narrative was mostly maintained.

Later came video and then DVD, meaning some shows could be owned like books or albums. If there was no official release, you could at least swipe your own copy and with timers you didn't even have to be there to do it. Now you had the choice, whether to follow along at the pace the broadcaster set or wait until the end and then watch it all at once. Or on any schedule you chose, really. You could also rewind to make sense of any bits you couldn't follow or to look at a particular scene in detail.

Later came the Box Set (Binge) era, which still lingers on in some contexts, although its cultural hegemony is over. Box sets got pushed into the background with the advent of the streaming era, when I and I'm sure many others thought we'd reached Peak Viewing Experience.

Everything would always be there. You'd be able to start and stop at will. It'd be like having the Great Library of Alexandria a fingertip's touch away.

That never happened. It felt a bit like it in the early days, when there were fewer streaming platforms and it seemed as if there might eventually be just one streamer to rule them all but, like the imagined end of physical possessions, that turned out to be a fantasy. 

Instead, not only do streaming platforms proliferate but they're all subdividing like amoebas, splitting into "channels", each of which requires a separate subscription. And as if that wasn't annoying enough, they're reverting to the traditional practices of the networks and broadcasters they were supposed to replace, scheduling shows weekly or at even less convenient intervals, presumably in the hope of constraining customers from exercising their increasingly numerous but decreasingly satisfying options.

All of which is well-known and most of which I've already hashed out here, about as often as Old Television put out repeats of the same damn shows. Except that watching Runaways has alerted me to a new phenomenon, which is that sometimes access to shows can be so disrupted I can't even fricken' remember what I've already watched!

It really was a shock to find I hadn't even watched an entire season of a show I thought I'd enjoyed. I could put that down to my ever-less-reliable memory but really I'm not going senile, not quite yet. I never had a great memory but it hasn't gotten substantially worse. I just never expected to have to follow a single series across multiple platforms, let alone over a period of years, in this counter-intuitive and very irritating fashion. 

At least in the broadcast era there were magazines you could buy with the schedules laid out clearly and unequivocally. And the networks announced entire slates of shows in advance for the whole of the Autumn, Winter and Spring. (Summer was all reruns, of course Who sits inside watching TV when the sun's out?) You had to wait but you knew what was coming and when and where.

 

I'm not saying it was better then, It was not better then. It's better now. But I think it might have been better still five or ten years ago, just for a moment. 

The good news, at least for me, is that it might, just possibly, get a bit better again, soon. I mentioned the other day that we in the UK are finally going to be able to watch HBO Max. That's quite exciting but there's been a further development.

In March, Sky, a service I have always shunned, will be offering a package including not just its own offerings but also HBO Max, Disney+, Hayu and Netflix. Supposedly, all of this will be available for £24 a month, which is not unreasonable. That's the base price, though, and I haven't seen the details. I bet it includes ads.

I have frequently paid more than that for multiple streaming services so it seems reasonable, especially when you compare it with subbing to Netflix and HBO Max separately. It won't do much for most of the issues I've been complaining about, namely scheduling nonsense or shows changing or leaving platforms, but it ought at least to reduce some of the churn.

Whether I'm willing to give money to an organization I've scrupulously avoided until now is another question. Decisions, as they say, have consequences although in this case the only consequence would be another compromise to feel morally uncomfortable about.. 

I guess I'll find out in March, when both the Sky package and the direct HBO Max stream become available. I suspect in the end my distaste for Sky will trump my penny-pinching parsimony but I wouldn't - ironically - put money on it.