Move Over Water-Cooler Television, Make Way For the Movies
About a week ago, my “best friends” text thread was blowing up.
The four of us were recommending TV shows to each other. The thread was getting heated because no one was taking anyone’s recommendations seriously. One friend was adamant that the Apple + show Servant was a must-watch. Another was recommending The Alienist. Every single one of us consumes completely different television. We all wanted to chat about what we had just watched and yet, we couldn’t.
At no other time in modern history have four best friends not been watching the same TV shows. Of course, on a macro level, this is what’s happening across the world. This sort of television consumption was ramping up pre-pandemic and has now gone full haywire during the pandemic.
We all watch different TV and we’re all consuming it at very different times. Gone are the days when you could expect every single person in your friend group to know exactly what was happening on all your favorite shows. Hell, even in the early Netflix original era, everyone was watching the same programming. Remember the early House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black days?
All of this is to say that we have finally lost water-cooler TV. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s officially gone. And with the amount of new television only continuing to ramp up, we’ll never return to a world in which the cultural zeitgeist all points in one direction…on television, at least.
But a water-cooler movie? Now that, my friends, still very much exists. And we need it now more than ever.
Enter Godzilla Vs. Kong. As I sat down to watch this movie, I texted the group thread. What do you know? Everyone had watched this or was planning to watch it this weekend. This is a water-cooler movie.
The movie, which is just shy of two hours, is the perfect mild commitment. It’s not a 10-hour series. It’s just entertaining enough to keep you engaged and before you know it, it’s over.
For years, we’ve been told that “movies are over” and TV is the only way of the future. This just isn’t true.
We’ve long exited the “Golden Age of Television” and now exist in the age of, well, way too much television. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of good TV out there…there’s just too much good TV and too much bad TV and, mostly, too much mediocre TV.
However, the culture needs something we can all talk about. And not just sports or news. We need collective art that we can all discuss. No matter who you are. And that’s what TV has always been. From the sitcoms of the seventies up until recently, it was art for the masses. Art that everyone could see and discuss collectively. But, we’ve lost that. And we’re never getting it back.
With the rise of direct-to-streaming movies, especially zeitgeisty blockbusters like Godzilla Vs. Kong, we’ve found something beautiful in something as old as film itself: A Movie That Everyone Is Talking About. A water-cooler movie that’s highly accessible.
I’m excited to fire up the group chat and find out what everyone thought of the movie soon. Because it feels good when you and your friends can have some healthy discourse about something you’ve all experienced.
In an age of such isolation, it feels great to be united. Even if we’re just united over a stupid movie with a giant lizard and a giant ape fighting each other.
