Smash is one of the worst shows on TV. It’s also one of the most fun.
There are hundreds of hours of original television programming released every week, and, if TV critics and the Internet literati are to be believed, only a select few are worth watching (and of these select programs, even fewer are popular with the mainstream TV-watching, 2 Broke Girls-loving populace).
So why, then, do shows often critically or culturally vilified — The Big Bang Theory, say, or NBC’s Broadway-or-bust musical drama Smash — rack up hundreds of comments on online message boards and pop culture websites, while high-quality cult favorites go undiscussed? Then again, why do little-watched but much-praised shows like HBO’s Girls receive so much hostility from certain parts of the Web? Shouldn’t we celebrate our beloved cable gems while we can?
In other words, we are left with a distinctly modern paradox: Why are we spending so much time watching and talking about shows we hate? And why do we spend so much time hating shows we — supposedly — love?
The Internet, coupled with the explosion of live recording and the boom of streaming sites (such as Hulu and Netflix), has given viewers access to more TV than ever before — the good, the bad and the somewhere-in-between. As a result, artists, critics and audiences alike are talking about TV in a way they never have before. “Hate-watching,” or watching a show strictly to criticize or mock it online, was born out of this new critical landscape, carried out in real time on Twitter and in the comment sections and message boards of sites such as IMDb and The A.V. Club.
On the one hand, hate-watching is emblematic of everything that is wrong with pop culture consumption today. Overly snarky and often lacking depth, many comments are made out of blind hatred or the desire to be the first to quip, even if there’s nothing of substance to say. And there is no excuse for the misogyny and racism that certain dark corners of the Internet throw at shows such as Girls or The Mindy Project. Talking about quality and content is one thing, but attacking a show because its creator is a woman or a minority is a different matter entirely.
And, of course, there’s the age-old issue of economics: If people watch a certain show — even if just to mock it — networks are going to keep creating shows just like it. Whatever gets eyeballs gets made. There is no denying voting with a remote will do more to change the TV landscape than snarking on Twitter.
That said, there is a simple truth about hate-watching that far outweighs its potential harms: Making fun of bad TV is, well … fun.
Take Smash, which is set to start its second season tonight. The first season of the theater-themed drama was at times transcendently awful, a fever dream of a show where Bollywood musical numbers crashed up against random Nick Jonas cameos. Needless to say, I watched every single episode, laughing to myself all the while. The show has apparently been seriously retooled for its second season, bringing in new stars and a new showrunner. But if the show develops better quality, it will almost certainly become less interesting as a result; I would rather have a daring disaster than another sanitized, mediocre network dramedy. Train wrecks are always more fun.
Ask comedian and all-around nerd icon Patton Oswalt, who recently joined so many other comics and writers in tearing apart Liz and Dick on Twitter when the Lifetime original movie first aired. The film was an unmitigated disaster, but watching tweets about it unfold in real time salvaged it, turning a dismal piece of television into a crowd-sourced work of comedy.
And hate-watching can have positive effects on the medium itself. Lena Dunham’s Girls came under fire online throughout much of its first season for skirting around issues of race and the privileged nature of its main characters. Rather than rebuking or ignoring her critics, Dunham is now smartly using the show itself as a response; season two seamlessly incorporated Donald Glover’s black Republican into the show’s world and started to, as A.V. Club TV editor Todd VanDerWerff put it, “call the characters on their bullshit.” Rather than hiding, Dunham confronted her critics, and her show improved noticeably, opening up the conversation to larger discussions of race, class and gender.
This is not to say all hate-watching should be — or should even aspire to be — so idealistic. Sometimes it’s just fun to sit with some friends and talk about how terrible The Office has become. Like any movement born and bred on the Internet, hate-watching can be a destructive, offensive force. But it is an inescapable reality of the new TV landscape. We now have a more immersive and more open television community than ever before. Hate-watching, then, is nothing more or less than an effort to put TV, arguably our most populist medium, back into the hands of the people. Everyone’s a critic, for better or worse.
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