I’m not sure if I am even legally allowed to say this while covering for a light and breezy weekly culture newsletter, but: O, am I tired of culture! There’s just too much of it, from too many angles, all of the time. If there isn’t a new TV show dropping on one of the countless ‘pluffixed’ platforms Gwilym wrote about last week, then there’s a must-see film in cinemas, or a two-hour podcast I have to listen to entirely then have an opinion on. This is how culturally saturated I am: it wasn’t until the second draft of this paragraph that I even remembered the concept of music. Albums! Songs! Dance trends! It’s exhausting! No wonder the Grammy committee heard 50 seconds of a Harry Styles song on TikTok and just went: “You know what? Give him album of the year.”
A new trick I have pioneered, then, is consuming outside of the hype cycle. I mainly do this with TV but you can do it with whatever, really. Recently – as in, over the long dying weeks of Dry January – I slowly meandered through three of last year’s biggest and most talked-about TV series, cut shorn of the context of time-sensitive hype: Severance, Bad Sisters, and the last two half-series of Better Call Saul. I also watched the entirety of Euphoria at a time when no one was tweeting about it or doing memes about it on Instagram, which was its own interesting personal experiment – it turns out I have already seen every single frame of Euphoria in a screenshot, but I have never seen them joined together and sped up in what the industry calls “footage”.
This experiment was fantastic for two distinct reasons. One, I did not have to live by anyone else’s cultural schedule. I simply don’t know how people find the time to not only breathlessly consume as much culture as they do but then have either a dizzyingly wrong take about what they’ve just seen or a burning need to talk about a finale in a way that spoils it for anyone else. With season two of The White Lotus, for example, I slowly noticed as the discourse around it escalated to the extent that it had become the talked-about show, meaning I had to watch the finale the absolute second it dropped on Sky before it got spoiled for me by somebody else. I’m glad that episode tied up a lot of lazy loose ends (it wasn’t as good as season one, was it? We all have had enough time and space to get to that conclusion, yeah?) but as soon as I looked at Instagram after the credits rolled, boom: there was a glossy, breathless spoiler waiting for me, a simple square Instagram post that would have ruined the show for me if I hadn’t raced to see the ending.
Two, I had space to form my own opinions. I think it’s easy to get carried away when one show ascends to the status of the culture-dominating conversation for the few weeks that it’s on, and you find yourself projecting quality on to something where you don’t necessarily see it because there must be some reason these people are talking about it so much, right? (Or at least I do, anyway.) This didn’t happen when I watched the last few episodes of Better Call Saul without the fever-pitched hype around it (the last episodes of the show were fantastic, but did not in any way justify the endless 55 hours of of TV that came before it, or the sheer number of times I had to see Mike very slowly enact a plan. If I expressed this opinion while weekly episodes were dropping there would have been a movement to have me put in the Tower of London). Nor did it happen when viewing Bad Sisters away from the anticipation of a weekly drop (it was interesting, with good performances, but tell me: can you remember anything about it?). Severance, though, you were all right about. I’ll accept that one, at least.
I am duty-bound by the format of this newsletter to now recommend you five must-consume cultural artefacts that drop around this week – which I will, but my true advice is that you should go back and watch something you missed from 2021, and see how much you enjoy it.
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