Small Screen, Big Love

TV series are like long term relationships: they seduce us slowly but engage us for a very long time. And that is why we feel so involved with them. They create bonds that are hard to break.

Even with the most indulgent director's cut, a film won't last longer than three hours: like a summer flirt it can be intense and satisfying but it's a self enclosed experience. If it's a good one, we will forever remember it, treasuring in our heart the best moments. But it's over. We knew from the start it was never meant to last. We can only relive it again and again in our memories. It forever belongs to the past. 

With a good sitcom, we spend many a night for nine, ten years, week after week: it's a love story. Always changing, always evolving, never quite the same experience. A TV series has a present, a past and a future.

Like an ongoing relationship, a TV series is susceptible to transformation, developing into something very different from its beginnings. It has its good days and bad days: sometimes it delights us, other times disappoints, surprises or infuriates us. But we're always there for each other. Because everybody involved wants to make it last. We are engaged.

A TV series has a present, a past and a future. Like an ongoing relationship it is susceptible to transformation, developing into something very different from its beginnings. It has its good days and bad days: sometimes it delights us, other times disappoints, surprises or infuriates us. But we're always there for each other. Because everybody involved wants to make it last.We are engaged.

With TV series we share a significant part of our existence... many of our friendships and love affairs don't last as long. It is strange to think about it, but there are only a few special things in my life that have endured as much as E.R.or South Park (even my husband and kids haven't been with me that long yet). In the last decade I've changed 6 apartments, 8 jobs, 2 continents, I've lost some friends along the way and made new ones, but Ted Mosby, MeredithGrey, Dexter Morgan, Bart Simpson, Stan Marsh have been with me the whole time. 

Yep, the whole time. Not just 24 or 50 minutes per week. Like a long distance relationship that doesn't amount only to the time shared together, for all that happens in between the romantic encounters matters: the phone calls, the lonely nights, the hours spent remembering the sweet moments or worrying about the past fights and the ones dedicated to plan and imagine the next date. A TV series is part of our life because it lives in the time between episodes: those days or weeks are filled with our memories, expectations, worries, discussions, anticipations. 

Movies are exotic adventures. To experience them, we have to leave our usual environment and enter a foreign, special place, the theatre. And in there, for a few magical hours, normal life stops. We share the darkness, we dream, we cry, we laugh and when the lights go on, it's over. And we go back to reality. 

TV series instead take place right here in our apartment, home is where they belong. The experience is less powerful but much more intimate. The screen is smaller, the volume lower, lights can be on and so our telephone, maybe washing machine spinning and kids crying. Life goes on, never stops for them. That's the limit and the beauty of TV series: they live with us. 

Like long lasting relationships, they trade the intriguing exoticness for the everyday intimacy.

So it is much more dramatic when a TV series ends. Even more painful if along the way it loses the sparkle that made us fall in love with it in first place.

We will not obsess for long about how a film develops and ends, mostly because if we don't like it, we know we never invested much in it. At worst, we wasted an evening out. We are not exposed to more delusions because it's already and forever over: we won't be tempted to repeat the painful experience to see if the next time it will be better. As with an unsatisfactory one night stand, we move on, ready to erase that bitter memory with a new date, a different partner.

A TV series, instead, can leave us heartbroken. And, like a dysfunctional relationship, it can prolong our pain for long time, even years, before we finally break up. We refuse to let go because we already invested so much in it.

In fact, sitcoms and TV dramas ask for a lot of our time and energy. Hundreds of hours watching, many more thinking and reading and talking about it, always wondering what will happen next. Also there's the effort to not miss any episode which requires some planning and a strategy: remembering TV schedule, recording, downloading, streaming, buying DVDs... We committo follow them. 

Like a long term liaison, a TV series demands our loyalty (if not exclusivity) and generosity. We have to make space for it in our everyday life and be willing to give our most precious resource: time. We choose a series among so many others because we feel like it's right for us. We are conscious of starting a serious relationship, one that could keep us company for many many years... or, as in real life,it could end abruptly when we least expect it, leaving us filled with remorse and unanswered questions.We expect years of good time from it but we promise to endure during bad times, hoping things will get better again. We know all the risks involved when we begin our sentimental journey.

That's why we take it so personally if our beloved drama, or sitcom, loses its verve, its plots get exaggerated or implausible, its characters become shallow or start acting in a way that is not consistent... shortly, if TV series “jump the shark”. We gave our loyalty and we expect the same in return.

When a series doesn't ring true to us anymore, becoming a cheap counterfeit version of the original, it's like it's cheating on us.It happens a lot, it's happened to the best of them: Dexter, The Simpsons, Weeds, Entourage, Gilmore Girls, Community, How I Met Your Mother...

And when a relationship goes bad, everyone involved is left wondering what went wrong. We obsess about the moment things started falling apart, we struggle with our hopes that it will eventually get better, like a delusional lover who can't help but torment himself and his friends about his misery.

The Sad Truth is: a series will seldom end well. Because it is a profit oriented enterprise and while it's good, it will go on. Only when its plots eventually hit the skids, and the ratings drop, then it will come to a conclusion. Like any love story, it would never end at the top of the game, when everybody's happy; it ends because it doesn't work anymore. So before it's over, we have to endure a long and painful agony. And when the moment of the final goodbye arrives, the last episode airs, it's hardly satisfying and surely not what we want to remember about the whole story. 

Still, the heart of us TV lovers is so big that we will forget about all this and be ready to give countless hours (years?) of our life to the next series we fall in love with. Hoping for it to have a happy end. Or to never end.

So if people think we are crazy obsessing about TV series, spending too many a night with them and talking about it all the time, remembering every little detail, indulging in their great moments, criticizing harshly but still caring, unable to break the bond.... well, they don't get us: we're not insane, we're in love.