STRANGER THINGS, The Binge Watching Model and Fast Food Television

A moan about storytelling in binge-television television (feat. Stranger Things)

So, after the trailer for Season 2 of Stranger Things dropped, delivering increased horror, Michael Jackson and Cthulu, I felt the urge to go back and check out the second half of Season 1, following a failed attempt to make it through the show last year. For those who are unaware, Stranger Things is an ode to 80s Spielbergian movies wrapped up in Stephen King horror/sci-fi and focuses on a bunch of kids looking for their friend after he goes missing. It's a show whose influences should put it right up my alley and yet, each time I've given it a go, I always come away from it a bit deflated and frustrated.

(I'm about to bash on Stranger Things. For my actual review of Stranger Things - including stuff I like about it - click here).

See, after a pretty solid first episode, the show slams on the handbrake to the extent where the next seven episodes or so are a bit akin to watching a show happen in slow motion. We see the kind of supernatural revelations coming a mile before the characters do, which goes beyond LOST’s cruel taunting of “I want answers/Haha lol no” to a sort of place of “I want the answers/Okay/Well can I have them?/Umm/Isn’t that the answers over there?/Huh, what are you talking about?” It’s obliviousness, but it also isn’t because the very first thing that Stranger Things shows us is the supernatural monster, so why does it then spend the next few episodes pretending along with its characters that there is no supernatural element (see: the ending of episode 3).

But it’s more than that. Over the course of the season, virtually every single one of Stranger Things’ characters has at least one moment that makes no sense to the characters as they are already established. I’m thinking of moments like Nancy going into the evil portal tree when she has no awareness of the upside-down, or its significance (ignoring the more straightforward question of ‘why would you go in the clearly evil tree portal?’). Or how douchebag boyfriend guy goes from being full-asshole to repentant asshole for no reason other than he got beat up, which I don’t really buy as a pivot point for his character, given how full-asshole he has been going for the whole season.

Problem one (languid pacing) seems to abet problem two, in that once you get a story that is forced to wheel spin for seven episodes, characters glitching out is probably not the most surprising casualty. Andrew Matthews pretty much nails it perfectly in his article 'Stranger Things and the Problem of “Plotblocking”':

"Spielberg’s classics are actually very simple stories. They’re emotionally broad and fiercely economic. Every shot moves the story forward and nothing goes to waste. If you’re staying loyal to the conventions, you can’t stretch that 90 minutes into more than 300 without some serious padding and repetition.

How many times do we have to see the cool guy seduce the nerdy girl? How many times will Eleven use a radio to prove Will is still alive, or guide the boys into the woods and back again, with no new information to show for it? Why do you think people complained that Winona Ryder’s weeping became tiresome? Because she was asked to perform the same emotion over and over again. Besides being frustrating, these repetitions actually dilute important moments. How much more exciting would it have been when the sheriff and Joyce infiltrate the evil government lab if we hadn’t already seen him do it before? He even makes a joke about using the same method."

Whilst watching Stranger Things, the same instinctual response kept biting away that this series should have been either half the length or a movie. ‘Fiercely economical’ is a good goal to aim for with an 80s-inspired Spielberg/King-esque story and it is absolutely not what we get here, which is, in effect, a supernatural horror comedy that older kids could enjoy, crossed with a laborious drama. But when I look at this sort of show, I can’t help but turn to the Netflix binge-watching model as a suspect.

The binge model is often tossed around as one of the primary selling points of Netflix – the ability to gulp down entire seasons of shows in one go, because they are all in front of you, with the autoplay switched on and absolutely no effort required. Binge watching as a way to watch TV is not something I’m about to sit here and completely tear down, given how often I’ve done it with some of my favourite shows (okay, basically any show I like that isn’t Doctor Who or Sherlock). But I do find myself often curious as to how much binge watching distorts our view of the shows that we watch. For instance, Junice prefers to watch Game of Thrones in one big chunk after the whole Season is available to eliminate slow pacing, whilst I wonder whether I would have actually watched more than half a season of LOST were it not for the fact that I had all the episodes available to me on DVD. It looks as though binge-watching increases our tolerance towards shows which we might have found too slow otherwise, which itself begs the question of whether it’s the show that’s the problem or the way its watched (though, to be honest, it’s usually the show). Whatever the case, Netflix, by its very nature, settles firmly on the ‘binge’ side of the argument, going so far as to make it part of its brand identity.

Which means, when it comes to their Netflix Original's, they often incorporate that binge-watching idea into them.

Now, of course, this is not going to be new information to most people and I would also like to put it out there now that I claim no insider knowledge to the Netflix creative process - I have no idea whether the Duffler Brothers were pushed to an eight-episode format by Netflix or whether it was their own desire. Regardless, Stranger Things conforms to the binge format and seems to come off worse because of it. Other Netflix shows often suffer the same fate – Marvel’s offerings, whilst critically acclaimed (for those most part) are just as difficult to get through. I like Jessica Jones and yet I could not finish the bloody thing (I’ve been told that I should so, maybe, we’ll see). Going beyond Netflix, we can still find examples (Game of Thrones, whilst a show that I very much like, doesn’t half take the piss with its pacing – though that’s a whole other conversation regarding the ‘checking in’ approach to narrative)*.

This result – a show that feels like its at a standstill – is the kind of thing that binge-watching often goes someway towards eliminating; when hurtling through shows at full speed, there’s often a sense of reaching the goal that tends to blots out the bits where nothing much happens. It’s part of the reason that I think Game of Thrones is much easier when you watch it in a big sitting – when one sitting yields results, it feels less like you’re wasting your time. But then that just breeds a new problem in and of itself: by getting us to hurtle past chunks of a programme without much of a second thought, we’re encouraged to treat shows as disposable – something to be enjoyed once and quickly before moving on. It’s the conversion of TV into fast food.

Given the amount of time that goes into making an episode of television as well as how good television can be, the idea of treating episodes as disposable is pretty startling to me. We seem to be in this weird paradoxical situation where pop culture, television and film are part of the national conversation more intensely than ever before, yet we treat it all like it’s made of plastic. And I find it especially weird that this is happening at a time in which TV is being approached with more of a cinematic toolbox, unlocking wider potentials for the way we tell stories. If this were the 70s where every show was shot in multi-cam with the purpose of being a way to get people through the day, I might understand it, but when you have the ability to hit highs such as Breaking Bad, I’m not sure how we’ve collectively decided to devalue the artform as such.

Which leaves us with this weird feedback loop of ‘binge-watching’ leading to ‘devaluing’ which requires ‘binge watching’ to fix it again. In fact, we’ve probably got something of a ‘chicken and the egg’ situation here, in that I’m not totally confident which one has lead to which.

Now, I’m not here to say that we should do away with binge-watching. As I said earlier; I do it myself too much to the point where I understand the merits of it, plus I’m not naïve enough so as to think that binge-watching is going away anytime soon. So, in the world of binge-watching, what's the best way for a show to react?

Funnily (and unsurprisingly) enough, a lot of the shows that are the most fun to watch on Netflix, tend to be the ones not made with the binge-watching model in mind - often ones that preceded and eventually aided its popularity. Oh and virtually all of them have an enormously tight focus on their episode by episode stories. I’m thinking of shows like Buffy, or Breaking Bad, or Community. Looking across at what my friends watch, Supernatural looks like it might fit this bill as well. They each share a common focus on episodes as a ‘story within a story’, rather than the ‘one-eight of a story’ approach that Stranger Things seems to have.

For my money, the best show at riding the line between ‘the episode’ and ‘the season’ is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now I've already had a whole slobbering fangasm over this show earlier in the year, so I won’t stick around on this too much, but Buffy had this remarkable knack for taking an episode off to focus on a ‘monster of the week’ scenario, whilst also performing vital character work and/or moving the story arc forward. There’s a great episode called ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ which starts, ostensibly, like a standalone tale in which Xander’s love potion goes wrong and affects every girl in the school. But not only does the show manage to gracefully weave discussion of the series arc into the episode, it brings the subjects of that arc screaming into the events, with the main bad guy finding his own plan mucked up by the love potion. To describe it is to take away some of the pizzazz but it’s breath taking to watch and I can’t help but feel that if a show tried that sort of shtick nowadays, Netflix’ viewership would crap its collective pants.

Look, there’s a reason Rick and Morty is absolutely crushing it right now. The following clip cycles through more story and ideas than Stranger Things manages in ten times the runtime.

Circling back around, isn’t the whole point of the binge model that once we finish an episode, we feel like we just have to see the next one? It takes a lot of effort on the viewer's part to have that kind of enthusiasm with shows that simply treat their episodes as disposable and it’s the reason I struggle to muster much enthusiasm for Stranger Things. Heck, it’s part of the reason as to why I champion the vitality of Doctor Who so much (almost got through a blog entry without mentioning it).

I don’t take a whole lot of pleasure in writing articles like this – for one, it’s far too easy to come out of them looking like a grouch who hates everything. I want to stress now that this is not the case. Out of a lot of the shows in popular circulation at the moment, I can probably name more that get this sort of thing right than those that do not. Rick and Morty, Better Call Saul (that might sound like a weird choice, but I stand by it) and Netflix’ own Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt are just three off the top of my head. But it’s the shows like Stranger Things which still sneak into the popular discussion that make me roll my eyes almost involuntarily. These are the shows which seem to content to let the viewer do just as much of the work for them (and I don't mean in a Sherlock 'come on keep up with us' kind of way). So, as someone who is still very much looking forward to Season 2 of Stranger Things, can I shout into the void for a second with a personal plea to the creators of this show? Please don't take our interest in your show for granted. It might get me through episode one, but episode eight is pushing it.

---

--I'd like to make a point of referring again to Andrew Matthew's article, which is a really great, kind of blistering read on this kind of subject matter--

Oh and a reminder that my slightly fuller thoughts on Stranger Things Season 1 can be found by clicking here.

*The checking-in approach is where each episode works by 'checking in' on each of its characters. It works for Game of Thrones because that show's cast is enormous, though it's telling how interesting it really is, given how Game of Thrones' best episodes have tended to come from ones that only focus on one or two areas (e.g. Hardhome, The Battle of the Bastards etc.), though Winds of Winter was really good.

#strangerthings #netflix #bingewatching #buffythevampireslayer #buffy #rickandmorty