Why The Office is Netflix' Most-Streamed Show (or, “Finding Friendship in Friends”)
The Office is the most popular show Netflix has, and other similar shows round out the top 10 (Friends, Parks & Rec, etc).
“I have seen the statistics for their top 10 most-downloaded of everything—shows and movies. What gets considered is a movie or a season of a show. Of the top ten most-downloaded, seven were different seasons of The Office. It’s crazy.”
“It’s hard to say what the phenomenon is of watching a comedy a second time,” he added, with a chuckle. “I’m not sure I understand it.”
What is this? Why are so many people re-watching the same shows over and over again?*
I have a hypothesis about what our media habits reveal: We want to passively consume a fictional friend group.
These shows allow us to feel a shadow of a vibrant, dynamic and fulfilling social life, without any of the work or risk to our comfort.
How?
These shows are all predictable, low-energy, lightly funny, and non-challenging.
More common traits:
revolve around pleasant, predictable, funny characters.
low-energy to watch: no shocks, loud noises, or injuries
Minimal conflict
Funny, without being edgy or alienating people.
No enemy, evil, or over-arching struggle. (Compared to Game of Thrones)
Emotions are lightly expressed and quickly resolved (compared to This is Us.)
They are enough episodes to re-start continuously, and not get bored with watching the same episodes (Could watch 1 hour of the office per day, and it would take 6 months to finish it.
(And... they’re great!)
We use these shows as a white-noise machine of friendship. It is a social pacifier for stressed, drained, and often lonely adults.
We live in a golden age of media. Across Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, HBO, etc., we could always be watching incredible, mind-blowing new movies, from all through history and all across the world. We could watch a new documentary every day. We could find nearly any media we dream to fill our free time.
Yet millions of subscribers re-watch sitcoms from the 90s and 2000s.
We choose to take a shortcut to pleasant mindlessness. This is the media equivalent of taking a Xanax. It allows us to be selfish. We can turn on and off companionship as we want.
This is pornography for companionship. Porn allows us to be selfish. To access lust and satisfaction on-demand. Companionship through TV shows is similar, in the sense that it allows us to be selfish. We turn it on when we want, then off the instant we decide we want something else.
Our tv-show friendships demand nothing from us. We never disappoint them, hurt their feelings, or get asked to drive them to the airport. We never have to empathize. We are never hurt. We don’t risk our fragile hearts.
We just put our nose to the glass, feel a moment’s contented warmth, and move on.
When we fill our social needs (lust, love, or companionship) with shallow on-demand, digital versions like Porn or The Office, we sacrifice depth, growth, and our relationship to reality.
Depth
Depth of friendships, and relationships are important to us as people. Chemically, biologically, we are programmed to build and benefit from deep, trusting relationships with each other. We thrive not just when we know and trust others, but when they know and trust us.
Replacing real-world friendships with the temporary solace of digital companionship is to choose a shallow experience. To stay in our newly-narrowed digital social comfort zone is to choose to experience a small fraction of life. It is to live life in the bathtub instead of the wide, wild oceans of the world.
Growth
Our friendships help us grow, change, and develop. We grow when we see our friends grow, or we outgrow friends who don’t change as we do. Through relationships we build our worlds, our families, and our sense of self. No human is an island.
Choosing to make TV shows our social pacifier is to choose stasis. Every episode we let auto-play is another 30-minute dose of Xanax. We opt for the dulling effect to delay the pain of challenge, growth, and change.
Relationship to Reality
Imagine every hour of predictable, passive TV to be an hour in a coma. We are not learning, building, growing, or supporting others. We are not really experiencing ‘reality’ — we use these shows specifically to get out of the flow of reality for a few hours.
And it feels so good to slip away from reality. To feel something, anything without being expected to contribute. Without having to pour our dwindling energy into something, or to put our hearts or our egos in the arena to possibly be stomped on by a friend, a date, a spouse, or a child.
So we choose an hour of ‘coma’ — of hiding from our own thoughts, our own friends, our own lives.
This is an absurd exaggeration, I know. Any individual hour is irrelevant. Maybe 1,000 hours are irrelevant. We all need and deserve a break, and each enjoy our own forms of recreation.
The exaggeration is just to provide a way to visualize this, since the scale of this pattern is incredible. Humans streamed 52 million minutes of The Office in 2018.
I think it would have been difficult to predict this 10+ years ago, before infinitely accessible media. Who would have expected that people’s drug of choice is to go comatose on a low-dose drip of riskless digital companionship?
(Oh, I guess Facebook did…)
“To live every day of your life the same way is to only live for one day.”
Notes:
*there are many reasons for this, but not all of them are as interesting. These include Paradox of choice, aversion to the unknown, and the fact that these are incredible shows that are tough to beat. Maybe another essay.