Roger’s $0.02 - How Streaming TV Killed FOMO

TV was once a cultural touchstone for many who grew up in the latter half of the 20th century. Shared experiences like watching the Olympics, watching the first human alight a man-made spaceship onto another celestial body, and TV commercials became focal points for shared discussion at school, the dinner table, in the workplace, and even in national debates. To be left unaware of these cultural memes was to open yourself up to ridicule and possibly the losers’ circle on trivia night at your local bar. Even if you didn’t want to, you had at least a surface-level understanding of “Who Shot JR” on Dallas or understood the premise of a mini-series like V or Amerika. You also gained a sense of FOMO if you didn’t watch at least some part of these shows to say you knew what people were talking about. Streaming has killed all that for me. There are too many shows and not enough time in my life to watch them. With so many sub-tribes devoted to a particular series, the FOMO has been greatly diminished because the social currency they carried has been deflated. 

Back in the dark ages of linear broadcast TV, the networks each had tentpole shows that were considered must-see TV. Evening soap operas like Dynasty, Dallas, and Falcon Crest. Drama shows like Hill Street Blues, ER, and China Beach. And of course, comedies like Cheers, Northern Exposure, and Thirtysomething. Shows are so important in people’s lives that entire evenings are planned around them. With satellite and cable TV, things got a little better. To fill out airtime with limited content, some cable networks would run multiple airings of the same shows and episodes. So, while you had more choices of what to watch, you also had an increased number of opportunities to watch it. 

When VCRs became commodity items, they instantly shaped the concept of time-shifting for home viewers. You no longer had to be in front of the TV at 8 pm or 9 pm to catch a popular show. Just rewind the cassette to watch, and you’d still be able to join the watercooler discussion at the office the next day. Fast forward to the 2000s. When Netflix was a DVD-by-mail-only subscription service, bingeing a season of The Sopranos, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or any series out as a box set was an exercise in social literacy. You could now catch up on the cultural zeitgeist of whatever TV show was the buzziest all over a single weekend. 

But time-shifting only takes you so far. You’re still beholden to network schedules and what and when shows are released. That in turn sets the tone for the pop-culture milieu. Can’t talk about a show that doesn’t get aired or an episode that gets limited broadcast, regardless of how many VCRs you own. However, ever since the cable and TV boom of the 1990s, there has been a trend of segmenting audiences by interest. A history buff? Here are a half-dozen shows designed with you in mind. Want more DIY instructional content or travel and food shows? Then A&E or the Food Network has something for you. This process became supercharged with streaming TV. Not only do you have streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon, Disney/Hulu, and a half dozen others offering unique content on their platforms. You also have YouTube with its millions of videos created by hundreds of thousands of creators, each filling a unique content niche. The result? A deluge of content that caters to almost every demographic and interest. 

The consequence of this flood is the complete atomization of the audience. In times past, there were a few shows that could pull in audiences across age groups and socioeconomic backgrounds. That’s become a less common situation as content providers seek to attract and keep eyeballs glued to their wares. With less content in common, fewer people feel less of a need to keep up with everyone on every show. I watch a half-dozen shows a week, and because streaming affords me the ability to watch whenever I have free time, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. Plus, with so many fan-focused sites and exhaustive breakdowns of every episode, even if I don’t watch, I can get a quick synopsis. The result is that I don’t FOMO, at least with video content. There’s so much I have resigned myself to understanding there are things I will miss and will need to be missed. Even when I talk to friends about shared shows we watch, I realize we’re often at different points in the series. In addition, many series franchises like Star Trek will have so many spinoffs it's hard to keep track of them all, let alone have seen all the recent episodes. I’m as big a Star Trek buff as you can imagine, but I haven't even seen all the episodes of ST: Discover, ST: Strange New Worlds, and ST: Lower Decks. I don’t feel like I’m missing out because watching those episodes begins to feel more like work and less like leisure, which I desperately want it to be. Being spoiled for choice has made me less interested in watching any kind of streaming video content than before, and I don’t feel bad about it.