To hear most experts tell it, watching TV as a collective event is increasingly rare—or at least far less frequent than it used to be. A huge part of that is the physical television's ever-weakening status as the lone outlet in the house: Why fight over what to watch when everyone can go to their own room and run down their own Netflix list? It's why industry watchers are fond of publishing pieces about the "end of watercooler TV" (do we even still have water coolers in our generic, readily metaphorical offices?). And those changes should come with attendant demands for understanding how viewing habits have changed.
Obviously, immediately accessible streaming series lead to different methods of viewing. But as much as people like Beau Willimon want to describe this change as producing "concentric circles," increased accessibility tends to mean that specific shows become focal points, creating vast, lumpy conversations. Far from being cohesive, online TV chatter is riddled with air pockets of time travel—people in various stages of binge, all heading toward the present tense of "currently airing" episodes.
If viewing the same thing at the same time is becoming rarer and rarer, though, what about the viewing party? I set out to find some of these gatherings, in hopes of understanding some small sliver of the way we watch TV now. Over the past month, I attended two parties: one for the series finale of Mad Men and one for Game of Thrones’s season finale.
Going into this experiment, I figured that some scripted TV is best watched like sports—in particular, Game of Thrones, a show that benefits immensely from self-conscious overinvestment in its silliness. On the other hand, Mad Men—which became weirder, more precise, and simply better as it aged—seemed like it would be much harder to watch with other people. Sussing out editing, directing, and acting choices is key to parsing Mad Men, and a crowded bar isn't exactly conducive to that.
Reality, it turned out, didn't really care about my assumptions. The Mad Men viewing party at Brooklyn's Videology (where Game of Thrones parties were recently publicly shut down by HBO—and in the interest of full disclosure, it's also where I host an event) was fantastic, while the Game of Thrones event at Huckleberry Bar, less than a mile away, was tepid and difficult to sit through.
When Mad Men fever reached its apparent peak during the final season, some people claimed that its popularity was a media-perpetrated scam. But to hear how excited people were when Stan finally consumed Peggy in his glorious, massive beard, you wouldn't know it.
Audience reaction to Mad Men was, if not in lockstep, at least vocal enough to make it clear that the show was the crowd's primary interest. With Game of Thrones, on the other hand, half the crowd was taking things seriously and the other half was ignoring the proceedings—and the disparity between Stannis stans and terrible bros made every moment of a nails-on-a-chalkboard experience. (Everyone has certain things they care about, and other moments when they feel okay ordering nachos.) Saying someone is watching a TV show the "wrong" way is ridiculous and condescending, but it's also true that everyone in that bar was being a total idiot.
People laughed at Sam and Jon Snow's goodbye scene (because LOL male friendship, I guess); they applauded when Reek pushed someone off a castle. "I'm gonna need like ten more drinks," someone said after Jon was almost certainly not killed. "Nooooooo!" another person cried, ignoring literally everything about the way Game of Thrones operates.
Look. Maybe I'm the problem. There are lots of ways of engaging with a piece of entertainment and many plausible reactions to pretty much any scene from the GoT season finale—but where they created harmony with Mad Men, here there was only dissonance and screaming.
But there's one thing I took away from both experiences: This mode of viewing exacerbates pretty much every tendency serious fans have—at least the ones willing to travel to a bar to watch an episode of TV. The "awww"ing every time the doomed Betty showed up became contagious, as was the weeping during her final conversation with Don. When "Steggy" finally happened, the room tittered, refusing to believe, before erupting when Stan showed up at Peggy's door. (Peggy is, of course, a fan-favorite character, and shipping her with Stan is a hobby of a very particular sort of Mad Men viewer—the kind who populated this screening.)
The only other time I've watched Mad Men with such a large group—a premiere event hosted by Slate—the crowd was asked who their favorite characters were, and while everyone went nuts for Joan and Peggy, I was almost entirely alone in my vocal love for Pete (who is the best). But that reaction, even when you disagree, captures the way the event, and the experience of watching the Mad Men finale, was fun—embodied by an impromptu pool some of us started to guess the last song to play during the episode.
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"Of course you had a much better time," you might point out. "Half the people you know from the Internet were there!" This is 100 percent true, and a huge part of the reason watching Mad Men was great and watching Thrones with annoying dudes sticking their heads in front of me was terrible.
If there's a community surrounding TV, it's mostly moved online, manifesting in specific moments via the frenzied reading of takes and exchanging zingers. (It's possible I'm reading my own experiences into this, but at the very least, this mode of viewing has eaten away at the standard one.) Without WiFi at Huckleberry, there was no pressure for actual commentary on either Thrones or its fans—something that it turns out is key to my own viewing process.
That's consider a third viewing party I attended, for the season finale of Orange is the New Black. This one took place on my couch, alone, at 11 AM, with breakfast. It was exciting, actually; I'd characterize the experience as falling somewhere between the two actual parties. Mostly, watching Litchfield inmates frolic around a lake (and pausing the action while I gchatted with people about it) highlighted how much TV watching has become a contemplative, often physically isolated experience. Some of that is because of the fandom it nurtures, some because of the in-depth analysis that prestige shows invite, but watercooler TV isn't dead—it's just that everyone took their cups back to their own house.
Meanwhile, the whole viewing-party thing had an unexpected wrinkle to it: Closure is better, it turns out, when you're processing together. The GoT finale party emptied to nervous laughter, affirmation that the showrunners had maintained the show's status quo—as much as people liked Jon Snow, they knew that Thrones would continue to Thrones. When Mad Men ended, people slowly streamed out, not quite sure what had happened. Some people had seen this coming and were disappointed. Some felt punched in the gut by the cynicism and cruelty of Don transforming enlightenment into copy. But at least we were there. By definition, TV shows aren't supposed to end—they're meant to just keep running and running until no one wants to watch them. But, sometimes, it's nice to have other people there when they do.
