Is social media good for scripted media?
How today's scale and speed of TV fandoms impact the shows we love
Do you remember your first online rabbit hole? Mine was about TV, specifically Mad Men, a stylized and stylish drama on AMC in the mid 2000s about people working at an NYC ad agency in the 1960s. I loved the storytelling and the high production of this show, along with the beautiful cast, and so like one does… I got obsessed.
Like a sports fan feeding on post-game analysis for hours longer than the actual play time, I chased each new episode with fan commentary. My favorite was the blog, Tom and Lorenzo, which wrote excellent episode-by-episode deep dives on characters’ costuming and how these reflected their storylines (shoutout to legendary costume designer Janie Bryant). Suddenly, I started to watch television in a new way and with a closer eye. Talented, precocious Peggy in a power pantsuit always meant something good. Yes, these analyses boosted my ego and made me feel like a discerning consumer of the craft of storytelling. But these blogs also gave me a sense of shared experience with other nerds/snobs who loved the show as much as I did, and this community compounded the anticipation I felt for new episodes to drop each week.
Today, ten years after Don Draper dreamed up the hippie coke ad in Big Sur, TV fan analysis has gotten more sophisticated and become a content genre in its own right. The kind of fan fervor which used to be relegated to comics and sci-fi has now hit the mainstream. And so, regardless of whether your show of choice is like Game of Thrones or leans more Succession, I’ve found that today’s prestige TV watching process looks more or less the same:
Avoid all potential spoilers at all costs, including checking your texts or reading the news, until you can get home and watch your show
Watch episode
Immediately go on TikTok to recap what you just saw
Cross-reference TikToks with ‘professional’ critiques on traditional outlets like Vulture or The Guardian
Go on YouTube for deeper dives and Taylor Swift style Easter egg hunting
(optional step): Rewatch the entire episode if you have time
Is this time-consuming? Yes, and also sometimes stressful. Is it necessary? Probably not. But it’s fun, and can be great for creators and platforms. These rituals offer content creators of both the traditional and P2P varieties to milk more views and engagement on a weekly basis. So for a ten-episode season, creators can meaningfully grow their accounts in a very short period.
Let’s take Severance, for example, which just finished its second season on Apple TV+. If you haven’t seen it, all you need to know for now is that the show mostly takes place in the sparse office of a company called Lumon, but nevertheless is a goldmine for online Easter egg hunts: a sci-fi mystery, commentary on corporate greed, inter-conscious love triangles, marching band choreography, and in-office goats.
Viewers loved Severance, and the numbers show it. It is now Apple TV+’s most watched show ever and is credited with producing a 126% increase in Apple TV+ sign-ups in the lead-up to its second season premiere between 1st-19th January 2025, compared to the month prior.
Creators benefited too, especially smaller accounts for whom making content on trending topics can grow their audiences and engagement. One of my favorites was the creator @claire.healey, whose presence on #booktok, meticulous notetaking and bookshelf backdrop made her a credible and thoughtful commentator.
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Here are Claire’s TikTok engagement metrics over the last six months — tracking her posts’ likes, shares, comments, and saves. A clear ‘Severance bump’ can be seen over its second season, which ran from 17th January to 21st March 2025. Claire’s a charming creator, and I’m thrilled for more creators like her to build their audiences. (note: it’s still early in this case, but I’d love to learn more about the longer term sustainability of these metrics bumps…)
Recently, I’ve started to wonder how the scale and immediacy of today’s fan engagement might impact actual storytelling decisions. After all, Hollywood writers, producers, and studio heads are also just people living in the world, seeing the same fan theories and ships that we do. It’s hard to believe that anyone can avoid it or be immune. We know that Severance executive producer and co-director Ben Stiller certainly can’t.
So I have to ask: what impact (if any) do our TV fandoms have on the shows we love so much?
In the case of Severance, my unpopular opinion is that the story suffered. Starting with the three-year wait between Seasons 1 and 2, fan expectations soared online, and there was no way that the show could both meet those and serve the story. Simply put, Season 2 tried to do too much. Yes, there was promise for interesting storytelling around race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. But more often than not, these nudges towards depth and tension were abandoned for meme-able moments seemingly designed more for online sharing than for narrative advancing. By the time we got to Tramell Tillman’s amazing performance with the Lumon marching band in the Season 2 finale, I was simultaneously enthralled and agitated by the flaunting of all that Apple money.
Apple also gave us a swift confirmation for a third season of the show. Fan service is nothing new (if it was, Ross and Rachel would never have ended up together), and fan organizing to save cult favorites like Arrested Development and Community are the stuff of legends. What’s new, as is usually the case with the Internet, is the scale and speed we’re operating on. And while a third Severance season is great for its talented cast and crew, Apple, and the fans who want it, it does the story a disservice. Folks, it’s ok to let stories end with bittersweet ambiguity. Like the glorious ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, we don’t need to see what happens next. I know that we live in an era where not knowing things feels obsolete, but truly not every question needs to be answered.
Let me know what you think. Do you want a Season 3 of Severance? (to be fair, even though I will do it begrudingly, I will most definitely follow the aforementioned prestige TV watching process for it!). Also, do you think Ricken is a goat? What other shows do you love to analyze? Which creators should I follow for TV recaps and Easter eggs?
Scrolling through
Pete Davidson laments that streamers are making movies simpler so that you can half-watch them while also scrolling on your phone. Commenters argue that this is nothing new, simply a genre that’s been around forever, and criticizing it devalues longstanding categories like daytime soap operas or telenovelas, which historically cater to stay-at-home women.
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Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserAmy Poehler has a new podcast, Good Hang, and went on her ex’s podcast to promote it. Talk about #adulting with grace. All great listens.
President Trump went to my hometown last week as the commencement speaker for the University of Alabama, the alma mater of my parents (both international students) and many of my friends. There’s not been a lot of national attention on this, despite consistent reporting about Trump dismantling higher education through his antagonizing of Harvard. I can’t help but feel like this is another example of how the mainstream’s focus on elites blinds us from the bigger, nuanced picture of how the right keeps connecting with voters and winning them over.
Happy place
Because dogs may just be one of the last purely joyful places on the Internet, let’s celebrate them. Meet Sydney, a 4-year-old Heeler who’s stolen hearts and minds simply by shaking her ass. We love her brother Oliver as well, even though he doesn’t twerk.
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