Our Hunger is Insatiable and Our Patience Wears Thin

We all need to slow down and smell the roses

A few months ago I got asked the same question at work incessantly: 'Have you seen Dahmer?' This was the well made but somewhat tasteless dramatisation of the actions of a real life serial killer that everyone was going daft for at the time.

And no, I still haven’t.

It's not my cup of tea, but that's not the point of this particular story.

What struck me about this moment in time is that barely a few months on, absolutely no one is asking me that question. Noone is talking about that show. It came and went with all the bluster of a fart in a hurricane.

It’s fascinating what does and doesn’t flood the cultural zeitgeist every year. Obviously the lingering appeal of big hitters like Game of Thrones and The Mandalorian make sense in the moment. As they continue to broadcast, these powerhouses dominate discourse, letting loose a torrent of memetic material that is perfect for the way we digest culture in this contemporary era. But then other things burn bright and extinguish almost as quickly as you can eat a big mac. And it’s not really clear where the delineation between these two types of trend lies. 

This isn’t really what I want to talk about in this article, but it’s a progenitor to this kind of question I keep getting asked and why I’m finding it’s starting to stain my excitement for things. I am increasingly turned off of the modern way of doing all this. The constant need to turn heads towards the next big thing as soon as the credits roll on the previous one. 

It seems to me that conversations around media juggernauts just disappear overnight because it's all over now, and the folk who watched it as soon as it broadcast have had their fill. People always laugh at how quickly Game of Thrones briefly but abruptly left the cultural sphere when it ended, attributing this to how allegedly bad its final episodes were, but the same could be said about most things that come and go.

I could recall maybe a scant dozen shows that have stood the test of time, and paired with them a dozen more just as good that have simply vanished from the zeitgeist.

I don’t think it’s a specific phenomenon, some of these examples are amplified when the thing in question is so big it sucks the air out of the room, and obviously a big multi-season behemoth is going to outlive a one off mini-series, but I don’t necessarily think it’s a question of quality either.

In any way you look at it, by the time this article finally gets published, I’m certain folk will no doubt have forgotten all about Dahmer, much as they did Squid Game, Tiger King, and Making a Murderer, and whatever else was massive for just a fraction of the universe’s lifespan.

This single-use-only attitude towards media is something I think has affected me more than I realise. I’ve written before about having this crippling anhedonic reluctance to pursue the things I know I love. A problem that continues even now. Eternal FOMO that I can only blame on myself, but that is informed by this manic race to the finish that society deems appropriate to mark its media with.

I resent the sense of obligation that comes with such things.

There was a time when the done thing was to drop an entire season of TV onto whatever streaming platform you like, where many would annihilate the contents over a matter of days, or even hours. I would at the time appreciate the value of this approach, put it all up in one go and let people take it at their own pace. But what actually ended up happening was that folk were talking about the denouement of a story before others had even started watching the first episode. There were no conversations about individual parts of a show, unless something really remarkable happened, that particular kind of remarkable that’s less to do with the power of a performance or a great bit of camera work and more to do with [massive spoilers] or something meme worthy.

I feel like that in itself did the individual craft of a TV episode a huge disservice.

For months I worked on ways to encourage myself to be more meaningful in my cultural digest. Creating an artificial TV schedule, forcing myself to watch the things I knew in my head I would really enjoy. Nothing ever stuck. I still found myself slugged down by this ravenous environment that demands the nuts before all the guests have finished their soup.

And then I started watching The Bear.

8 episodes, 30 minutes per. Arguably, and by a very wide margin, the best thing I will have seen on TV in 2022. One could easily rinse the entire thing in an afternoon, and still have time to get into an argument with a stranger on the internet. It's slight, compact, and brilliant. The perfect candidate for my tastes, and my free time.

I've watched 3 episodes. 

I don't know when I will watch the fourth. 

Surprisingly I'm not unhappy about this, because the things that made me fall in love with those three episodes have remained, a sweet and rich aftertaste that I want to linger for as long as possible. And it’s not that I don’t want to find out what happens next, rather that ‘what happens next’ is not the point of the show.

If you’re unfamiliar, The Bear is a drama series centred around a troubled but brilliant chef who returns to his hometown to take over the ailing business of his late brother, dealing with the trials and tribulations of not only trying to run a restaurant well, but to elevate it to the next level while everyone around him remains staunchly committed to the here and now.

While in part a dialogue about the obscene culture of bullying around the high end restaurant industry, and how running a kitchen is fundamentally not good for your health, the main draw of the story is this complex exploration of sadness, stress, personalities clashing and understanding the weight that bears down on the shoulders of others.

Shows like The Bear have something else going for them. They implicitly understand the importance of a single episode as much as the overarching narrative. They are character studies just as much as they are a fabled sequence of events. A story is being told, but the more important one is left unsaid, in lingering shots of joy, of anger and grief.

Those three episodes I’ve seen each presented a compelling one off story that I am certain would have worked stand alone without any of the context of what came before it. It’s almost an anthology in this regard, but more than that it's a thing that I strongly believe benefits greatly from being able to dip in and out of when the mood suits, like an expensive box of chocolates (if you don’t have impulse control issues like I do, I mean).

It makes sense that this has been such a success for my brain, it's on a platform that supports that way of enjoying media. And it leads me to beg the question: Why are we not building more TV shows this way? Streaming’s whole deal was to stow away the archaic traditions of art only being available at a certain time and place, free from the constraints of broadcasting format, emancipated from the need to work stings and revelations around ad breaks, but with that freedom instead we are watching TV in a way that does not benefit its format at all.

They might as well have made these shows 8-10 hour long films and be done with it.

These things, as often brilliant and compelling as they are, are designed to be consumed. They always have been, I suppose. We’re just finding it easier now to look at the stark naked truth of who all of this is really for, and in doing so we lose track of the things about the medium that would otherwise truly shine. 

I hope what you bring from this article is that the artistry of a single TV episode is something that I cherish. A work of incredible artistic output that very often can be elevated to be more than the sum of its parts.

I don’t think I’ll be finishing The Bear any time soon, and there is always the chance that I might never carry on with it. But please do not think this a tacit admission of poor quality on the show's part. Far from it, I got what I came for with those three episodes. I found within them something that inadvertently made me realise how not in love with continuity and big stretching multi-season plot arcs I am now.

Give me wild, relentless red passion and crippling dark blue devastation in 30 minutes or less. I know it can be done now

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