No, ‘Game Of Thrones’ Won’t Be The Last Communal TV Show

When something changes in popular culture, there can be an impulse to declare that the larger world has somehow been altered forever. The decline of physical media must mean that albums are dead. The rise of Netflix must mean that cinema is over. And yet, in spite of these proclamations, albums continue to exist, and people continue to go to movie theaters. Our constant vigilance for an entertainment-related apocalypse hasn’t yet stopped the world from turning. (Thank goodness.)

And so, according to some pundits, the series finale of Games Of Thrones is supposed to bring about another mini-doomsday scenario. Supposedly, this will be the final TV show that “we” all watch together. I put scare-quotes around “we” because I, personally, did not watch Game Of Thrones. I also know many other people who didn’t watch Game Of Thrones, and I presume there are literally tens of millions of strangers who also don’t care. I don’t point this out in order to denigrate the show or the people who did watch it. I am not “bragging” about not caring about the popular thing. I am letting people enjoy things! I’m just saying, the royal we erases me and many others. Please don’t deny us our person-hood status just because we find shows involving zombies and dragons to be boring and/or silly. (Okay, so I denigrated Game Of Thrones just a tiny bit.)

There’s no denying that Game Of Thrones was an extremely popular TV show, or that many people treated it as appointment television, meaning they tuned in at a specific time and date each week, as opposed to simply watching it on demand. In some cases, it was because viewers wanted the communal experience of watching Game Of Thrones while also surveying the reactions of fellow viewers on social media. Though, I suspect, this is probably less common than it might appear. The vast majority of people aren’t glued to Twitter or Facebook while they watch a show. They might have wanted to watch Game Of Thrones right away simply because the media (this site included) breathlessly reported on every aspect of each episode the moment it aired.

But will Game Of Thrones really be the last show that people experience together I don’t believe that for a second. Something tells me that we’ll forget all about this conversation once Big Little Lies comes back. Or Stranger Things. Or Westworld. Or that Amazon redux of The Lord Of The Rings, when or if it actually airs. Absurdly popular things aren’t going away. Nor is wall-to-wall coverage of popular things. In fact, the opposite seems to be happening. Our most dominant cultural behemoths are getting harder and harder to avoid. And the media needs that to be so.

My perspective on this is informed by having spent most of my career as a music critic. This narrative about the dying monoculture occurred around pop music back in the early ’10s. At the time, there was a common assumption that no song or artist would be able to achieve critical mass in the fragmented internet era. For the most part, I thought this was a good thing. Why pine for the days when MTV and the radio fixated on the same pop stars Finally, the fringes might not be quite so marginalized! Back then, I was fond of positing my pet theory about how pop music as we knew it would no longer exist, given how much other music was now easily accessible. Finally, there would be no need for listeners to simply glom on to whatever corporate record labels fed them. You could now eat wherever you want!

Of course, I was wrong. Stupidly, idiotically wrong. I assumed that the preponderance of entertainment options would dilute the power of the those at the top. It was a massive under-estimation of capitalism’s power. What actually happened is that all of those lesser known options were simply re-marginalized, fortifying the strength and visibility of the top one percent. After all, it’s bad business to undermine the stuff that actually makes money — it’s smarter to redouble your emphasis on a few potential blockbusters, and let the rest either fade away or fall off altogether. The media itself was an accomplice, optimizing web traffic to reward coverage of the most popular things. Winners kept on winning.

There was also the fact that people like mass-appeal and corporate-supported pop music — in part because it’s shared by large groups of people, including their friends and family. (More on that in a moment.)

Now, I can’t exactly complain about this system, because I’m part of it — and I need it to work in order to feed my kids. I just want to assure the monoculture lovers out there that massively popular centrist entertainment isn’t going anywhere. The media is too invested in it to let it die. Earlier this week, Vanity Fair published a story about the so-called “Game Of Thrones bump,” and how coverage of the show created a “tidal wave of Thrones traffic” for entertainment web sites. People love reading about Game Of Thrones, and sites responded by giving them lots of content to read. And I’m grateful for that! As are my non-starving children!

The downside is that in order to feed the demand for Game Of Thrones content, you inevitably have to not talk about less popular things. It’s the same rationale that movie theaters have for putting Avengers: Endgame on every screen, rather than showcasing smaller movies. Or why music coverage now skews so heavily to the latest album by a pop superstar, as opposed to an equally worthy album by an indie artist who has 1/1,000th as much fame.

Now that Game Of Thrones is gone, the conversation won’t dissipate into a hundred different conversations about a hundred different topics. It will once again seek another big-tent item that “we” can all get behind. Soon, you’ll hear a lot about how “everybody” is watching Watchmen. If you’re not on-board, you’ll feel that implicit mental needling about not getting with the program. You’ll feel like a “nobody.”

If you really fear the end of monoculture, try standing outside of it for once. I tried to get into Game Of Thrones on three separate occasions. Each time, it put me to sleep. For a while, this wasn’t a problem — I’d fall asleep while watching people ride horses, and I’d wake up 20 minutes later to different people riding different horses. Each episode left me feeling refreshed! But eventually, watching Game Of Thrones just seemed like work, so I gave up. Though I always wanted to like it. Not being a Game Of Thrones fan felt lonely. I was locked out of the references, the speculation, and the endless (and I do mean endless) complaining. (Seriously, you people hated this thing!) Above all, I wanted desperately to belong.

If the media has incentive to prop up big-tent entertainment, it’s because we as consumers have a psychological need to not be left out. FOMO rules us all. Once you create the perception that “everybody” likes something, people will work overtime in order to not be “nobody.” And that’s not going away with Game Of Thrones. The shows will change, but our need to not be alienated from the herd will remain the same.