Okay. I am going to say something that everyone else is afraid to admit. I love to hate-watch. You’re flipping through the channels and land on a show you would never watch. “Oh, my God, who even watches this crap?!” you think, as you slowly get sucked into the drama/ hysteria/ insanity that unfolds.
People’s expectations from hate-watching are quite simple: to enter a world of entertainment they know they will dislike and beat its incompetence to death. But it also comes from an appreciation of the show’s theme/ premise/ scope. It is a world where people would like to like but, on being disappointed, spend their time figuring out why they don’t. No one truly hate-watches something they really hate. Because if you actually hate something, you turn it off. What we hate is the execution, not the premise.
There’s a fine line between guilty-pleasure media and watching something so bad it’s good! Like The Bachelor, which most people would define as a guilty-pleasure show. The “so bad it’s good” genre is difficult to master and takes the most acutely inept auteurs to achieve it truly. But how that disappointment morphs into pleasure is the premise of hate-watching.
Mockery has remained a central plank of our culture, a plank only supported by social media. But let’s step back and examine the types of entertainment we feel the need to loathe or justify publicly. Like, say, Riverdale, a show that started great and drew many of us in, but we now stay to make fun of it. And we all have that friend who claims they can’t stand Grey’s Anatomy but can passionately debate whether the show is better or worse after McDreamy’s death. (It’s better. He sucked.) At the height of Emily in Paris season 1 fever, when people were buying camera-shaped phone cases and debating whether the city in the show’s title was pronounced “Paris” or “Paree.”
Of course, hate-watching seems to be a vicious cycle — the more people hate something, the more popular that entertainment work becomes. It is a marketing trick, really. Hear me now: No one is “above” any kind of show. The entire point of pop culture is that it’s supposed to be for everyone to enjoy. And we should damn well be able to admit to loving what we choose to binge. Especially if we’re streaming it from a camera-case-covered phone.
Words by Rhea Gupta.
Graphic by Ilisha Sharma.