With nothing to do and nowhere to go, we’re fast running out of TV, so every time something new airs we lose the plot. But we have to get over it, Kerry Parnell writes.
Lockdown has given us OCSD — Obsessive Compulsive Series Disorder. We are devouring new TV shows with the fervour of a John Logie Baird cult.
How else to explain everyone collectively going bonkers over Bridgerton, or crackers for The Queen’s Gambit? We nearly lost our heads over The Crown — myself included.
Netflix is seeing unprecedented numbers of viewers, which is not surprising, when production has been severely limited by the pandemic. As our homes have become less sanctuary and more cell, the gogglebox is our only means of escape.
The streaming giant reported a record-breaking December, with a projected 63 million household views of Bridgerton alone, making it its fifth-biggest original series launch of all time, behind shows like Tiger King and Stranger Things.
And over Christmas some 72 million households watched George Clooney’s movie The Midnight Sky, despite it being — whispers — not very good.
Now would be the time to land a Netflix deal — hello Harry and Meghan — because you can frankly put out any old tat and our art-starved selves will send it to the top of the ratings. COVID does dull your sense of taste, after all.
I’m not saying these shows are bad, they’re not, but I would suggest, gently, they might not be as good as we think. Bridgerton, for example, is a bodice-ripping romp with such a preposterous premise it must be making Jane Austen spin in her grave. And The Queen’s Gambit was a show about chess. A good one, made all the better by Anya Taylor-Joy’s on-screen presence, but don’t you think had it appeared at any other time than during a pandemic, it might not have done so well? Smart move.
With nothing to do and nowhere to go, we’re fast running out of TV, so every time something new airs we lose the plot.
I’ve started watching old box sets again; I’ve re-done The Wire, The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire and Deadwood. It’s too soon for Game of Thrones, the pain over the ending is still raw.
But my other half has found solace in something much more peculiar … he’s gone into the TV wilderness.
He’s worked his way through 11 seasons of Building Alaska, where couples face the “ultimate challenge” of building a cabin in, you guessed it, Alaska, and seven seasons of Alone, the reality show where contestants construct a shelter in the wild and see who can sit there moaning the longest. It’s not exactly my kind of mini-break, but in these straitened times, I’d take anything.
Now he’s discovered wilderness YouTube, where survivalists post videos of themselves at best building tiny cabins and at worst, lobbing a few branches against a tree, before getting down to what appears to be the main appeal — cooking elaborate meals on a camp fire.
I kid you not, they pack more gourmet grub than Gordon Ramsay and whip up a three-course dinner involving an enormous slab of meat if they’re American and copious quantities of vodka if they’re Russian.
Why is this interesting? Probably because we’re all utterly desperate to get the hell out of our houses. The channels have thousands of subscribers and now even my kids love watching them, too.
Send help. Or a tent — I might trademark “Mum cooks the tea in a teepee” and flog it to Netflix.
