Think back to how many weirdo Mad Men theories popped up as that show approached its ending, or consider how often viewers tried to outguess something as relatively straightforward as The Americans. Not every TV show is built in such a twisty fashion, but online discussion too often fails to acknowledge as much. Robot and Game of Thrones withhold key information from the audience to enhance their surprising plot turns even Breaking Bad uncharacteristically kept the audience in the dark to preserve one of its most shocking twists (the identity of a certain poisoner). The idea that your favorite show is keeping something from you, that you need to figure out its secrets, is now applied to basically every show on television.
How The X-Files invented modern television Trying to solve a show became a popular pastime for a very good reason, and the decentralized nature of the internet - where puzzle-solving can be crowdsourced - made it an ideal platform for this form of consumption.
#Did little master season 2 top 3 people series#
The first major show to really see internet discussion take off was 1993’s The X-Files, a series built around an ongoing alien mystery, and the biggest boom in online TV discussion directly parallels the 2004-2010 run of Lost, perhaps the definitive mystery show. I can tweet about some obscure program and there will inevitably be somebody who wants to talk about it, something I have proved time and again with my beloved Borgen, a Danish political drama few Americans have seen but many people on Twitter would love to discuss.īut the internet unfortunately also popularized the idea that TV shows exist to be solved. The internet made the office water cooler global for just about any TV show.
Getting online after each episode to talk about it with your friends, or to read recaps from your favorite critics, only really became possible once the internet entered our homes. There’s a reason the rise of so-called prestige drama parallels the growth of the internet. TV and the internet were made for each other.