They say that ancient civilisations celebrated significant televisual events by gathering around a plastic watering hole in a building known as an “office”. These so-called “water-cooler moments” were characterised by buzzy chatter, as colleagues chewed over what they’d seen on TV the night before. “Who shot JR?” they asked. “You can’t kill everyone at a wedding!” they cried. Tissues were passed around because “She got off the plane!.”
Today, there are too many streaming apps and too few days in the office for people to catch up in quite the same way. Instead, online forums dedicated to dissecting TV episodes are thriving: on Reddit, more than 776,000 people have joined a subreddit about The White Lotus, while 765,000 discuss everything that happens in Ben Stiller’s dystopian workplace thriller Severance. Like colleagues around a cooler, people praise their favourite characters and share theories about what will happen next. Unlike colleagues around a cooler, they also accuse each other of being stupid, bigoted and perverted.
There’s no HR here, so who supervises almost a million people as they contribute their opinions – ensuring they stick to strict subreddit rules ranging from “no spoilers” to “no politics”? The answer – a lot of the time – is: Will Smith.
No, not that one. Will Smith is a 38-year-old from North Carolina who works for an airline. In his spare time, he also moderates 22 subreddits, including ones for House of the Dragon, The Boys, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Severance and The White Lotus. “If I’m moderating it, it’s because I like the show or the movie,” Smith says. “I just want a place to be able to hang out with other nerds and talk about stuff while being respectful to one another.”
A single episode of Severance can inspire up to 40,000 comments, so Smith spends three to four hours a day moderating. “Some nights we are getting 10m visits on [the Severance] sub and we have six moderators,” Smith says. An auto-moderating bot flags banned terms (such as hate speech, slurs and explicit content) and these comments are placed in a queue that Smith works through as soon as he wakes up. If one user in particular regularly gets flagged, moderators might issue a temporary or permanent ban. People can also get kicked out for spamming. Recently, a user was banned from the Severance subreddit for claiming to have read a leaked script and repeatedly insisting that the cis male protagonist was pregnant.
Both The White Lotus and Severance are shows filled to the brim with symbolism, foreshadowing and hidden Easter eggs, which means a large number of posts on these subreddits are theories. They range from the jaw-droppingly perceptive to the downright daft. “People get so attached to characters or theories that they want their take to be the correct one, and sometimes that means everyone else has to be wrong,” Smith says. “It’s like having a favourite sports team.”
In March, users of the Severance subreddit accused each other of racism. In Severance season two, a new character, Miss Huang, was introduced. Some theorised that she must be the daughter of another character, Gemma Scout, while others pointed out that “there is no logic or any kind of evidence behind this ‘theory’ other than the fact that both characters are Asian”. In the latest series of The White Lotus, a matriarch butchers the Thai language before briefly speaking it confidently – some claimed she was secretly fluent and actual Thai speakers had to disabuse them of this notion. “Please stop telling Thai speakers they do not know their own language,” one user wrote.
Moderators allow users to have these heated discussions, but have to act when things become uncivil. “Folks can argue back and forth respectfully and the comments and threads can remain up, but once they devolve into personal insults the mods step in,” Smith says. “We like to live by the rule that attacking the post or theory is fine but attacking the person crosses the line.”
One of Smith’s fellow mods on the Severance and The White Lotus subreddits is a 45-year-old pharmacy worker from Indiana who asked to be identified only by the initials MC. “As someone who is multiracial with a mother from Japan, the Miss Huang conversation was difficult to navigate,” she says. “Part of being a mod is ensuring my personal feelings don’t cloud my judgment when reviewing the sub, and sometimes you have to let the conversation happen so it won’t crop up again later.”
Meanwhile: is it sexist to dislike Severance season two, episode eight because of its reveal about a super-smart female character? Should you be locked up if you’re not sufficiently troubled by the age-gap relationship in The White Lotus season three, episode five? “You can talk about how you think the character in a show is a paedophile,” says Smith. “But if somebody comes through and is like, ‘They’re both of legal age, it doesn’t bother me,’ and somebody replies, ‘Well, you’re a paedophile too then!’, then no.” The debates that crop up are often unpredictable. “You can’t just make rules on day one and think these are going to take care of everything.”
For example, The White Lotus subreddit has a “no politics” rule, but this was essentially unenforceable after characters discussed voting for Donald Trump in a recent episode. “I think in those scenarios you have to be flexible with the rules,” Smith says. Moderators try not to alter the rules while a season is still airing, instead taking notes of issues that repeatedly crop up so they can make changes between seasons.
Of course, TV dramas begetting online drama is not the whole story. Users share hyper-intelligent analysis, spot tiny background details and interpret the secret meaning of a character’s outfits. They create original fan art, translate scenes that weren’t translated on screen and map out flaws in a show’s corridors. Others note that Radar the dog in Severance is played by the same canine who portrayed Mondale (the dog) in Succession. And the creators of certain shows have even been known to swing by and answer questions.
“I love that we’re an outlet for people who don’t have anyone in real life to talk about their favourite TV shows,” says MC. Moderating is unpaid work, so it’s this passion that keeps MC modding for around 30 hours a week, wrapped up in blankets and resting her hand on a cat-shaped wrist rest. “Moderating can be a bit like housekeeping. It has to be done, and usually goes unnoticed until it’s not done. The most rewarding part for me is when someone spontaneously says how much they love a sub.”
There are perks with the work: Smith now has industry contacts and has been flown to media events to see exclusive previews of shows. He also recently received promotional merchandise from Apple TV+, including a pair of AirPods. While some friends and family initially might have found his commitment to moderating a bit “ridiculous”, things changed after Amazon flew him to London for the second time. “From there on, I think everybody thinks Reddit is the coolest thing ever.”
It’s likely that moderating will only get more difficult as time goes on: membership of the Severance subreddit has tripled this year while The White Lotus sub has grown from just over 200,000 members in 2023 to its 776,000 now. “During season one [of Severance], there was a sense of camaraderie,” says Daniel Dang, a 27-year-old from California who moderates the Severance subreddit as well as ones for Better Call Saul, True Detective, The White Lotus and more. “Now, with more people trying to crack the show’s secrets, debates can become more contentious, and it’s harder to maintain that same sense of unity.”
Dang adds that “quality control” is another issue – fans themselves accuse each other of posting “dumb” theories. The moderator believes that “smart” shows “often create a sense of intellectual superiority among their audiences” which can lead to “defensiveness, arguments and, unfortunately, a lot of moderation work.”
But while it’s now a common refrain for people to accuse others of lacking “media literacy”, Dang believes TV subreddits prove the very opposite. “I disagree with that sentiment,” he says. “Discussions around pacing, story structure and character development are common in these communities, which suggests that media literacy is very much alive.”
Your office might not have a water cooler – you might not even have an office to grab a drink in – but it’s clear that, nonetheless, water-cooler moments are not dead. The cooler is virtual now, and the conversations happening around it are still very real.
