A Return Of Communal Pop Culture?
Fewer New Releases = Fewer Choices In What To Consume = Less Audience Fragmentation
When the pandemic first struck in early 2020, streaming TV was a cultural center point, providing a much-needed supply of entertainment to be binged as the masses sought ways to fill new quarantined lifestyles. For a brief moment, it felt like everyone was watching TV together, with Tiger King serving as a singular shared conversation point (before it was talked to death). But as the pandemic wore on, routines changed, and a unifying connection point waned. By the end of 2020, routines varied enough that true cultural alignment felt rare. In 2021, there were 559 adult scripted series that aired across broadcast, TV, and streaming — the highest number of series recorded to air in a single year — and the moments in which the cultural conversation focused on the same shows became increasingly rare. For many, rewatching old favorites was preferable to trying to keep up with anything new. Remember when The Office, Friends, and Grey’s Anatomy had their moment as the “biggest” shows across streaming?
This era may best be understood through the lens of 'Ambient TV' as coined by The New Yorker. The series we streamed served only to "provide sympathetic background for staring at your phone, refreshing your own feeds." But as furiously as we launched into this ambient era of streaming, we may just as furiously be emerging out of it. The volume of orders for original scripted series was down 40% in the back half of 2022 from the heights reached in 2019, and as a result, we're predicting in the year ahead to see the return of (streaming) TV content driving broadly communal and shared pop culture moments for audiences. While the tension in streaming has always been more choice for a mix of taste communities rather than a single Nielsen rated demographic, yet too much choice which at times overwhelmed audiences, with fewer new releases it's only natural to see the return of communal pop culture at a scale that we haven't seen in recent entertainment history.
From Netflix's Wednesday binge obsession to HBO's White Lotus weekly dissection, the end of 2022 saw a few select series once again become ubiquitous across social feeds. While the days of collective tune-in are long gone, with less new Originals to watch, 2023 is primed to usher in a newly important portion of campaign phasing, let's call it collective streaming, in which audiences experience the release as a form of communal pop culture -- rallying around collective touchstones as they are happening, whether binged or watched weekly, during the same time period of their relevance.