“Hill Street Blues” was the first “anthology” show, I believe. The one with arcs that last three episodes or so instead of an adventure a week. It’s also really really good.
Let’s hope this is a swinging pendulum and when they’ve finished playing with all the shiny and decide to tell character-based stories again, the pendulum will swing back to a happy balance between the two.
Korean dramas (come on, you knew this was coming, right?) rarely have more than one season. In that respect, they are more like the Western miniseries. The soapier ones have 20+ episodes, most run to 16 and the ones that seem to be based on webtoons run to 12. However, I’m seeing shorter and shorter series being produced by Western outfits. There’s a hell of a lot of flashiness in my latest watch (“Genie, Make a Wish”), which if they had focused on just a couple of those, we might have had some more couple screen time. I’m halfway through, but it already feels like they filmed more than they’re showing, with some odd jumps here and there.
I can always rely on your to bring the K-drama. :)
Drama series in the UK have also traditionally been one-and-done series, which is another specific form. And I didn't get to talking about ongoing soap operas. TV has spawned so many exciting story structures!
I was waiting for this comment! And I knew you'd deliver! 😂 K-dramas do serial storytelling really well. Also, I have to add, anime too, probably because most of it comes straight from manga.
Fully agree, and thank you for making me realise all this fully, because I hadn't really done so until now.
I just finished watching season 1 of Murderbot (Apple), which was a joy. Season 2 is on the way, but - in this case, it's definitely "serialised" because the books by Martha Wells have paved the way and the show (which Wells is involved with) is sticking ptetty closely to them so far. So maybe that's a last bastion of serialised TV - the books-into-TV variety?
(One exception to this: the heavily serialised For All Mankind, also on Apple and also brilliant, which gets away with its hefty delays between seasons by jumping forward a decade within the show's timeline each season.)
Otherwise - you're right, all of us waiting years for the "next episodes" is increasingly ludicrous. I feel like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has now been hamstrung by this, and now it's only getting one and a half more seasons to wrap up when there's only been 30 episodes so far - which is only just over a full season's worth of 90s Star Trek! (Also, of all the recent ST shows, SNW has been the most "monster of the week", so its serialised aspects have been muted.)
What all this makes me think is: the first people to reintroduce proper, lengthy, timely serialised storytelling back onto TV are going to make an absolute killing, and if serial novelists are a big part of that new renaissance by providing them with an already-tested map, I'm all for it.
If I think about my own serials, and the complete absurdity it would be if I waited THREE YEARS between seasons...it really emphasises how daft the situation is. :D
I haven't seen any AppleTV shows (yet), and I get the feeling they're doing their own thing over there. For All Mankind is Ronald D Moore, right?
It is! It's also RDM at his very best. The show has been incredible so far, with season 5 on the way, plus a spin-off. It started as an alternative history of the Space Race from a NASA perspective in the late 60s, with each season being a decade time-jump into an increasingly different world, and by 2002 (season 4) you have a colony on Mars. It's really exciting stuff. The spin-off will be the Russian side of things.
Yeeeaaahhh I haven't been watching any Western shows... for maybe years now? They just don't grab my attention and seem like they're trying so hard to be deep and cinematic, which wasn't something I ever needed from my shows. I've been watching a lot of Korean dramas and Japanese anime instead..
An interesting outlier is the UK sitcom 'Allo 'Allo, which, in typical UK fashion did roughly 6 episode series. Until they got a deal for US syndication. But now they had to do a 22 episode series. It's the weakest series of the run, because 'Allo 'Allo is a runaround where the core dramatic plots never really resolve (nor are they intended to), as well as being quite formulaic.
So, of course the problem became instead than having a year to come up with six GOOD variations of the same joke they had to do 22 (or was it 24?) variations of the same joke.
I dunno. That show is a bit burned in my brain as a late 20th century example of the advantages of a shorter series. You can see similar issues with any US adaptation of a UK series - higher episode counts for The Office or Ghosts (Although the US run of Ghosts worked surprisingly well!).
These days... Yeah, short seasons and multi year gaps? Nothing sticks. I will never again enjoy any show as much as the first run of Babylon 5 because there will never be another show which airs on day X at time Y AND has five years of story developed before going into production, meaning there will never again be that conversation about "Did you see last night?" and the speculation on where the story was going because, hey, there was a plan and they didn't LITERALLY THROW DARTS AT THE CAST LIST TO PICK THE FINAL CYLONS.
I binged a lot of stuff on streaming during COVID and I can't even remember the titles of most of them, much less what happened. I remember Vikings, Black Sails, and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. I think there was some show that was all 19th century Gothic something something where Billie Piper did all the nude scenes? If my recollection of the show is "I think Billie Piper whipped out her breasts a lot," your show wasn't good. Especially since, as a cis-het male with a lot of appreciation for almost every variation of the female form at the LEAST the recollection should be, "And Billie Piper did all the nude scene and she's spectacular!" not "I think I watched some show where Billie Piper got her kit off."
On an tangentially related side note, not only was Black Sails a fun "Treasure Island" prequel with stunning location work, and a convoluted story which saw many characters rise and fall, Jessica Parker Kennedy also did all the nude scenes, and Laura agreed that we really must thank her for that because, yeah, she's beautiful. And her hooker with business sense and ruthless efficiency character who rose to be a major power player in the Caribbean also had -- wait for it -- good writing (seasons 2-4, at least. S1 dragged a bit).
Zombies, RUN! I'm amused at how the game evolved. I had it long, long ago -- like 2010-2011 or so. Back then Zombies, Run! Was much simpler. You set a start point and end point on your GPS map, set the speed of the Zombies from three levels and the map populated. All you had to do was get to the destination without the game registering you as eaten. There was a night driving home at 3am. For my own amusement I'd started the game. Well I'm stopped at a red light and the game is telling me there are three zombies about 12 meters ahead shambling at me.
There was no cross traffic at 3am, so I TOTALLY ran it. The game didn't register my death, so I assume with my car accelerating the game decided they didn't get me -- or, in my headcanon of the event I escaped by running the zombies over!
The original version of Zombies, Run! Also had a group play mode. In this, several players could log into the same game. Everyone had to make it to the same location, but, what if I beat you there? The zombies still wanted to eat me! Well, each player, once at the final location, had one "Barricade." Trigger your Barricade and a 6 meter diameter circle stayed zombie free for 10 minutes!
This was back in the days when I jailbroke my phones so I had the original APK file backed up till around COVID at which point I upgraded to a phone which would no longer run the old app.
Anyways, just amused at how Zombies, Run! Evolved from a simple point-A-to-B game with a single multi-player hook to a single player only immersive narrative experience.
Good point about not sharing shows anymore. Gone is that water-cooler chat the next day about some episode in a serial, both sharing and learning.
Back in olden days, several of my co-workers on the production floor were Monty Python Fans. Every week we'd watch the Flying Circus, and the next morning compare notes on the episode, learn each other's likes and dislikes, and then actually act out the scenes.
Just got really nostalgic for A Touch of Frost! I agree completely with this take, particularly the loss of dialogue and community that old television series used to generate. No one really talks about what they watch anymore, which was a part of the fun, and it's not the same to discuss a series after you've binge-watched the whole thing, compared to breaking down an individual episode week by week. I also think that we lose time as the audience to sit with an episode before the next one is released and indulge in making predictions about what will happen next, and what decision a character is going to make. You used to be able to share theories with other people and then see which ones were right the following week... there was more opportunity to engage with the narrative in that way. Now, you just click the next button and find out straightaway, and I think that's less impactful, and why I don't really find myself thinking much about modern dramas after they're done: I haven't actually invested much thought, or time outside of the actual viewing, into them.
It's funny you mentioned Slow Horses at the end whilst discussing Andy Wildman.whilst I was reading it was going through my head that Slow Horses was one of the exceptions. Series not overlong (by British standards), produced regularly and with characters you care about. Plus each new episode is released every Wednesday so it's harder to binge watch, unless you wait until the end.
I think we can safely say that a return to previous viewing habits is unlikely. It's a shame for those of us who remember it as it was, but not to the next generation who don't. Habits change as technology develops - something is lost, but something is found. Maybe the days of multiple series of shows is waning.
Content is a neutral word, which didn't and doesn't reference to people who produce in traditional artistic fields, but doing it on the Internet.
Content is a valid description of the way we all consume stuff on the Internet.
Even when we curate our own experience, we're always on the edge of the abyss of mere content. For younger generations, I suspect that being in the abyss is the whole point.
With seasons being years apart (yes, ridiculous), Netflix gets the rewatch viewers for the previous seasons, because we've all forgotten what happened. I know I've had to do this a few times recently.
I used to rewatch seasons even when they were only a year apart. :D But that was less to do with reminding myself of what happened, and more because I'd formed a close bond with the show and wanted to be as immersed in its story as possible.
The word 'content' can make sense in a corporate, professional and business environment. A company having a content team, or having a meeting to discuss content strategy, is entirely normal. That's been the case for ages. I've been in loads of those meetings! The difference, at least for me, is that for those companies it is indeed just 'content': it's marketing and promotional material and it doesn't really matter what form it takes, as long as it does the intended job.
A painter, or a writer, or a musician, or a filmmaker self-describing their work as 'content', though....makes me twitch. It's that weird trickle-down vocabulary from corporate America, where you have normal people throwing around terms like 'IP' and 'franchise' and 'SKU'. All valid words for businesses that are producing stuff, but the way the terms have crept out of the boardroom and into commentary and fan discussions I find deeply weird. A sort of fetishising of capitalism..
Agree. Sometimes I rewatch for the enjoyment, but it's pretty bad when I have to rewatch because the initial series was soooooo many years ago that I need a refresher.
I worked in the ICT industry for many years, from the early days of the Internet. 'Content is king', was birthed in IT, unrelated to PR or marketing, or the broader corporate world (they only played catch up).
They were right, btw, content remains king. Anything that's thrown into the ether is content, and it can be monetized. That was the ethos from the start, even though many didn't agree or understand the direction of the enabling technology.
Yes, I wince when creative people call their work content, in the same way I wince when an outstanding writer refers to their newsletter as a blog, for example. 🤦♀️
Ha, I remember for YEARS resisting the word ‘blog’. I would rage against its use, pointing out to anyone within earshot that perfectly good words already existed, like ‘diary’ or ‘journal’ or ‘article’, and that we didn’t need to invent entirely new words for already-established things just because they were being distributed on the internet.
This is a brilliant article/essay. Articulates in great detail many of my own thoughts. Something is definitely being lost. Although I can't help wondering if this is just our "I'm getting old and yearning for the past" moment that all generations seem to go through. Older generations always think what they used to have was better, while the newer generations adopt and love what's new, and will then yearn for that when it disappears decades later. But also: I really feel like we're losing some incredible storytelling across film and TV. As somebody who is having a go at publishing a weekly serial novel, after loving feedback/responses to my short stories, I do hope you're right about people turning to serialised written fiction for their entertainment fix.
I think there's definitely a bit of 'getting old' going on here, at least on my part. But I don't really have a problem with new forms emerging - it just seems overly reductive to kill off the old models at the same time.
Anecdotally, I've been watching the Arrow and Flash shows from the 2010s with my 12 year old and he's loving them - and has specifically talked about how different they feel, with their 23-episode seasons. More time for character building, each episode is a properly self-contained mini-adventure, and there's still a satisfying long-term plot running at pace in the background, with each season having a primary villain. It's a structure he simply isn't familiar with, because it doesn't really exist anymore (other than in some animation he's watched over the years).
Yes I totally agree. I see my kids being attracted towards YouTube over streamers such as Netflix (despite my best efforts). It's a lot of "content", mostly based around videogames. There are some stories, but a lot of it isn't really storytelling (other than in the very loosest sense that there are stories in everything). Your article made me think: in 30-40 years' time will that kind of thing dry up as new things emerge, and will they be lamenting no longer being able to watch videogame streamers yelling while playing videogames?!
We don’t have water cooler chat anymore, but I’ve also worked from home for a long time. We do have Reddit. I find r/Andor to be quite fun, although sometimes too political — even for me — and there’s also a satire one called r/okbuddyimatourist. I follow an Expanse FB group but the discussions there aren’t quite as deep. Of course, these shows are over now. I’ve never participated while the shows were being released. That goes back to the problem/benefit of being able to watch whenever.
I have thought many times that I miss the connections the "Did you watch xxx last night?" brought. That time is firmly passed.
Streaming services have many advantages, but it can be really hard to find the good stuff.
(And I loved Babylon 5, and I used to translate Star Trek episodes for DVD)
“Hill Street Blues” was the first “anthology” show, I believe. The one with arcs that last three episodes or so instead of an adventure a week. It’s also really really good.
Let’s hope this is a swinging pendulum and when they’ve finished playing with all the shiny and decide to tell character-based stories again, the pendulum will swing back to a happy balance between the two.
Korean dramas (come on, you knew this was coming, right?) rarely have more than one season. In that respect, they are more like the Western miniseries. The soapier ones have 20+ episodes, most run to 16 and the ones that seem to be based on webtoons run to 12. However, I’m seeing shorter and shorter series being produced by Western outfits. There’s a hell of a lot of flashiness in my latest watch (“Genie, Make a Wish”), which if they had focused on just a couple of those, we might have had some more couple screen time. I’m halfway through, but it already feels like they filmed more than they’re showing, with some odd jumps here and there.
I can always rely on your to bring the K-drama. :)
Drama series in the UK have also traditionally been one-and-done series, which is another specific form. And I didn't get to talking about ongoing soap operas. TV has spawned so many exciting story structures!
I was waiting for this comment! And I knew you'd deliver! 😂 K-dramas do serial storytelling really well. Also, I have to add, anime too, probably because most of it comes straight from manga.
Fully agree, and thank you for making me realise all this fully, because I hadn't really done so until now.
I just finished watching season 1 of Murderbot (Apple), which was a joy. Season 2 is on the way, but - in this case, it's definitely "serialised" because the books by Martha Wells have paved the way and the show (which Wells is involved with) is sticking ptetty closely to them so far. So maybe that's a last bastion of serialised TV - the books-into-TV variety?
(One exception to this: the heavily serialised For All Mankind, also on Apple and also brilliant, which gets away with its hefty delays between seasons by jumping forward a decade within the show's timeline each season.)
Otherwise - you're right, all of us waiting years for the "next episodes" is increasingly ludicrous. I feel like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has now been hamstrung by this, and now it's only getting one and a half more seasons to wrap up when there's only been 30 episodes so far - which is only just over a full season's worth of 90s Star Trek! (Also, of all the recent ST shows, SNW has been the most "monster of the week", so its serialised aspects have been muted.)
What all this makes me think is: the first people to reintroduce proper, lengthy, timely serialised storytelling back onto TV are going to make an absolute killing, and if serial novelists are a big part of that new renaissance by providing them with an already-tested map, I'm all for it.
Yes to all that!
If I think about my own serials, and the complete absurdity it would be if I waited THREE YEARS between seasons...it really emphasises how daft the situation is. :D
I haven't seen any AppleTV shows (yet), and I get the feeling they're doing their own thing over there. For All Mankind is Ronald D Moore, right?
It is! It's also RDM at his very best. The show has been incredible so far, with season 5 on the way, plus a spin-off. It started as an alternative history of the Space Race from a NASA perspective in the late 60s, with each season being a decade time-jump into an increasingly different world, and by 2002 (season 4) you have a colony on Mars. It's really exciting stuff. The spin-off will be the Russian side of things.
Also, it's funny you mentioned NYPD Blue, because that's been my procedural cop-show guilty pleasure for the last 5 years - I'm on season 7 right now.
Triverse would be a wonderful serial for TV if anyone had the guts to run it.
Sadly,I think you're right about the loss of the "typical" program structure.
Thanks! I think Triverse might need to be animated, or otherwise be hideously expensive to produce. :D
Yeeeaaahhh I haven't been watching any Western shows... for maybe years now? They just don't grab my attention and seem like they're trying so hard to be deep and cinematic, which wasn't something I ever needed from my shows. I've been watching a lot of Korean dramas and Japanese anime instead..
On serialized TV:
Yeah, yeah, agreed.
An interesting outlier is the UK sitcom 'Allo 'Allo, which, in typical UK fashion did roughly 6 episode series. Until they got a deal for US syndication. But now they had to do a 22 episode series. It's the weakest series of the run, because 'Allo 'Allo is a runaround where the core dramatic plots never really resolve (nor are they intended to), as well as being quite formulaic.
So, of course the problem became instead than having a year to come up with six GOOD variations of the same joke they had to do 22 (or was it 24?) variations of the same joke.
I dunno. That show is a bit burned in my brain as a late 20th century example of the advantages of a shorter series. You can see similar issues with any US adaptation of a UK series - higher episode counts for The Office or Ghosts (Although the US run of Ghosts worked surprisingly well!).
These days... Yeah, short seasons and multi year gaps? Nothing sticks. I will never again enjoy any show as much as the first run of Babylon 5 because there will never be another show which airs on day X at time Y AND has five years of story developed before going into production, meaning there will never again be that conversation about "Did you see last night?" and the speculation on where the story was going because, hey, there was a plan and they didn't LITERALLY THROW DARTS AT THE CAST LIST TO PICK THE FINAL CYLONS.
I binged a lot of stuff on streaming during COVID and I can't even remember the titles of most of them, much less what happened. I remember Vikings, Black Sails, and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. I think there was some show that was all 19th century Gothic something something where Billie Piper did all the nude scenes? If my recollection of the show is "I think Billie Piper whipped out her breasts a lot," your show wasn't good. Especially since, as a cis-het male with a lot of appreciation for almost every variation of the female form at the LEAST the recollection should be, "And Billie Piper did all the nude scene and she's spectacular!" not "I think I watched some show where Billie Piper got her kit off."
On an tangentially related side note, not only was Black Sails a fun "Treasure Island" prequel with stunning location work, and a convoluted story which saw many characters rise and fall, Jessica Parker Kennedy also did all the nude scenes, and Laura agreed that we really must thank her for that because, yeah, she's beautiful. And her hooker with business sense and ruthless efficiency character who rose to be a major power player in the Caribbean also had -- wait for it -- good writing (seasons 2-4, at least. S1 dragged a bit).
Zombies, RUN! I'm amused at how the game evolved. I had it long, long ago -- like 2010-2011 or so. Back then Zombies, Run! Was much simpler. You set a start point and end point on your GPS map, set the speed of the Zombies from three levels and the map populated. All you had to do was get to the destination without the game registering you as eaten. There was a night driving home at 3am. For my own amusement I'd started the game. Well I'm stopped at a red light and the game is telling me there are three zombies about 12 meters ahead shambling at me.
There was no cross traffic at 3am, so I TOTALLY ran it. The game didn't register my death, so I assume with my car accelerating the game decided they didn't get me -- or, in my headcanon of the event I escaped by running the zombies over!
The original version of Zombies, Run! Also had a group play mode. In this, several players could log into the same game. Everyone had to make it to the same location, but, what if I beat you there? The zombies still wanted to eat me! Well, each player, once at the final location, had one "Barricade." Trigger your Barricade and a 6 meter diameter circle stayed zombie free for 10 minutes!
This was back in the days when I jailbroke my phones so I had the original APK file backed up till around COVID at which point I upgraded to a phone which would no longer run the old app.
Anyways, just amused at how Zombies, Run! Evolved from a simple point-A-to-B game with a single multi-player hook to a single player only immersive narrative experience.
Good point about not sharing shows anymore. Gone is that water-cooler chat the next day about some episode in a serial, both sharing and learning.
Back in olden days, several of my co-workers on the production floor were Monty Python Fans. Every week we'd watch the Flying Circus, and the next morning compare notes on the episode, learn each other's likes and dislikes, and then actually act out the scenes.
Just got really nostalgic for A Touch of Frost! I agree completely with this take, particularly the loss of dialogue and community that old television series used to generate. No one really talks about what they watch anymore, which was a part of the fun, and it's not the same to discuss a series after you've binge-watched the whole thing, compared to breaking down an individual episode week by week. I also think that we lose time as the audience to sit with an episode before the next one is released and indulge in making predictions about what will happen next, and what decision a character is going to make. You used to be able to share theories with other people and then see which ones were right the following week... there was more opportunity to engage with the narrative in that way. Now, you just click the next button and find out straightaway, and I think that's less impactful, and why I don't really find myself thinking much about modern dramas after they're done: I haven't actually invested much thought, or time outside of the actual viewing, into them.
It's funny you mentioned Slow Horses at the end whilst discussing Andy Wildman.whilst I was reading it was going through my head that Slow Horses was one of the exceptions. Series not overlong (by British standards), produced regularly and with characters you care about. Plus each new episode is released every Wednesday so it's harder to binge watch, unless you wait until the end.
I think we can safely say that a return to previous viewing habits is unlikely. It's a shame for those of us who remember it as it was, but not to the next generation who don't. Habits change as technology develops - something is lost, but something is found. Maybe the days of multiple series of shows is waning.
Content is a neutral word, which didn't and doesn't reference to people who produce in traditional artistic fields, but doing it on the Internet.
Content is a valid description of the way we all consume stuff on the Internet.
Even when we curate our own experience, we're always on the edge of the abyss of mere content. For younger generations, I suspect that being in the abyss is the whole point.
With seasons being years apart (yes, ridiculous), Netflix gets the rewatch viewers for the previous seasons, because we've all forgotten what happened. I know I've had to do this a few times recently.
I used to rewatch seasons even when they were only a year apart. :D But that was less to do with reminding myself of what happened, and more because I'd formed a close bond with the show and wanted to be as immersed in its story as possible.
The word 'content' can make sense in a corporate, professional and business environment. A company having a content team, or having a meeting to discuss content strategy, is entirely normal. That's been the case for ages. I've been in loads of those meetings! The difference, at least for me, is that for those companies it is indeed just 'content': it's marketing and promotional material and it doesn't really matter what form it takes, as long as it does the intended job.
A painter, or a writer, or a musician, or a filmmaker self-describing their work as 'content', though....makes me twitch. It's that weird trickle-down vocabulary from corporate America, where you have normal people throwing around terms like 'IP' and 'franchise' and 'SKU'. All valid words for businesses that are producing stuff, but the way the terms have crept out of the boardroom and into commentary and fan discussions I find deeply weird. A sort of fetishising of capitalism..
Agree. Sometimes I rewatch for the enjoyment, but it's pretty bad when I have to rewatch because the initial series was soooooo many years ago that I need a refresher.
I worked in the ICT industry for many years, from the early days of the Internet. 'Content is king', was birthed in IT, unrelated to PR or marketing, or the broader corporate world (they only played catch up).
They were right, btw, content remains king. Anything that's thrown into the ether is content, and it can be monetized. That was the ethos from the start, even though many didn't agree or understand the direction of the enabling technology.
Yes, I wince when creative people call their work content, in the same way I wince when an outstanding writer refers to their newsletter as a blog, for example. 🤦♀️
Ha, I remember for YEARS resisting the word ‘blog’. I would rage against its use, pointing out to anyone within earshot that perfectly good words already existed, like ‘diary’ or ‘journal’ or ‘article’, and that we didn’t need to invent entirely new words for already-established things just because they were being distributed on the internet.
Pretty sure I lost that argument.
In fairness, blogs had their moment, but it feels like decades ago now. Blogs are quaint. We all had one, back in the day. 😁
This is a brilliant article/essay. Articulates in great detail many of my own thoughts. Something is definitely being lost. Although I can't help wondering if this is just our "I'm getting old and yearning for the past" moment that all generations seem to go through. Older generations always think what they used to have was better, while the newer generations adopt and love what's new, and will then yearn for that when it disappears decades later. But also: I really feel like we're losing some incredible storytelling across film and TV. As somebody who is having a go at publishing a weekly serial novel, after loving feedback/responses to my short stories, I do hope you're right about people turning to serialised written fiction for their entertainment fix.
I think there's definitely a bit of 'getting old' going on here, at least on my part. But I don't really have a problem with new forms emerging - it just seems overly reductive to kill off the old models at the same time.
Anecdotally, I've been watching the Arrow and Flash shows from the 2010s with my 12 year old and he's loving them - and has specifically talked about how different they feel, with their 23-episode seasons. More time for character building, each episode is a properly self-contained mini-adventure, and there's still a satisfying long-term plot running at pace in the background, with each season having a primary villain. It's a structure he simply isn't familiar with, because it doesn't really exist anymore (other than in some animation he's watched over the years).
Yes I totally agree. I see my kids being attracted towards YouTube over streamers such as Netflix (despite my best efforts). It's a lot of "content", mostly based around videogames. There are some stories, but a lot of it isn't really storytelling (other than in the very loosest sense that there are stories in everything). Your article made me think: in 30-40 years' time will that kind of thing dry up as new things emerge, and will they be lamenting no longer being able to watch videogame streamers yelling while playing videogames?!
We don’t have water cooler chat anymore, but I’ve also worked from home for a long time. We do have Reddit. I find r/Andor to be quite fun, although sometimes too political — even for me — and there’s also a satire one called r/okbuddyimatourist. I follow an Expanse FB group but the discussions there aren’t quite as deep. Of course, these shows are over now. I’ve never participated while the shows were being released. That goes back to the problem/benefit of being able to watch whenever.