There's nothing more civically uniting (in my city) than taking about the Ravens.
If you can get over the geek, middlebrow dismissal of "sports ball" and the whole CTE thing, live local sports on TV crosses racial and class boundaries more than anything else I've witnessed in my 18 years living here.
One thing that helps me get interested in sports I don't otherwise care about is to think of them like a board-game, thinking through the math of various possibilities and optimal strategies.
Another thing, if you live in a state that's amenable, is to bet small amounts on the outcomes of games. Betting $20 on a game makes it way more entertaining (for me anyway), and when I lose, it was worth the money just to enjoy the game more.
The last thing that helps is to think of it as a purely physical performance. Going to watch live sports can help with this - but for people who haven't spent much time in the sporting world, it's hard to understand how big, how fast, how strong, how coordinated, professional athletes are, and it's possible to just enjoy watching people running and jumping and throwing the same way you'd enjoy watching people dance or play music or esports or whatever, just people with exceptional skills doing exceptional things.
At this point in my life, I emphatically do not enjoy sports for their own sake, I pay attention to them for the social aspect and for the reasons mentioned above, but I couldn't care less about the outcomes of anything. It's a far cry from how I felt about them as a young person, but it's evidence, perhaps, that not being interested in them doesn't mean I can't still connect with people over them.
The rest of us are just left out. Even if we get time to watch one or two episodes, we can't talk to the ones who binged it all, because they can't remember what happened in which episode. The only way to prevent spoilers is not to communicate at all.
I like the Disney+ way of dumping 1-3 episodes straight away and then an episode every week, that allows the water cooler talk and fan theories to develop.
Looking back from a personal standpoint, communal watching and discussion of those shared cultural phenomenons really marked my life. The most emblematic recent examples would be Lost and Westworld I think.
But it's funny your comment about TV blockbusters, it shows it's been going on for much longer and we didn't realize it. My mother use to tell me often about her childhood in the 50s, how every week-end they would show the big blockbuster westerns with John Wayne on TV for a whole afternoon, and it's what everyone would watch and discuss afterwards. And it's just now that I make the connection with this phenomenon.
Looking back at my childhood, I can't remember TV being anything but trash. (I think it varies wildly from country to country.) There were no blockbusters on TV, and Cinema played the role of providing that shared cultural experience.
Now Cinema is dead and we're going to streaming. Who knows where it will end, but maybe there will be room for that experience to continue in another form.
Furthermore, as streaming options proliferate, I assume that more people are hopping between services. Episodic releases don't totally solve that problem--but it does add some friction. Someone can't now signup for a service to watch the new hotness lots of people are talking about, binge watch, and then cancel their subscription.
Other stuff can still happen, eg. a colleague enthusiastically sharing something they learned or a discovery they made ("did you know how to properly use a paperclip?!").
But yeah, there's significantly less "things you probably also saw since yesterday and have an opinion about" stuff.
There's kind of still tentpole film releases, but Covid put a serious damper on that for a few years, and globally the market is splitting with China and India developing their own gigantic film industries equal to Hollywood.
Can you share the name of this podcast please? Sounds very interesting.
Church and community groups played a much larger role. Sport was still as popular. You might “go see a show” but it seemed like a much bigger deal than going to the movies is today.
My earlier comment wasn’t about people having something to talk about. It was that people were able to talk about an experience they both shared. Regularly. Like every week, if not every day (about watched they watched the previous night).
I think maybe the other observation here is that before TV people were more likely to actually experience things together with others, and not just talk about them after the fact. Way out of my wheelhouse here though as I’m no historian.
I'm not sure that's true. The studio system in Hollywood churned out a huge number of movies.
Today (and really for a long time) my sense has been that going to the movies tends to be about younger people on dates, getting together with friends for a fairly low effort, not too expensive activity. And, probably for this reason, from what I can tell cinema attendance has sprung back better than a lot of people expected.
But certainly the asynchronous watching has an effect too. "Everyone" watched Seinfeld etc. on Thursday night. Today, even for shows that drop weekly, most people are just out of the habit of watching shows as soon as they come out.
The person arguing the affirmative called out something I’d not fully appreciated: binge watching of shows has killed what we used to call water cooler conversations. Prime time TV was a great provider of shared experiences most weeknights. Sunday evenings would be some just-released-to-TV blockbuster. And we’d roll into the office the next day and “omg! Did you see X last night?!” Of course they did, there was only like 3 channels back then (I’m in Australia, don’t laugh ;). But binge watching, catch-ups, streaming in all its form has sufficiently time shifted everything to the point we have low guarantees about having a shared experience. Or maybe I only managed to consume 2 episodes, and you watched them all. But you cant remember exactly about… “episode 2, is that the one… oh no that’s episode 3! Never mind”. We’re not able to have the same kind of free flowing conversations we used to. They also pointed out that sport is one of the last remaining shared in thine experiences that provide that offer similar opportunities. But it carries with it the factional tribalism the can push us away from someone as much as it can unite us.
That was used as a jumping point to suggest this lack of shared experience has slowly broken our sense of togetherness and community. That in turn has fostered the kind of hostility to others that seems prevalent online.
I found that a bit of a bridge too far. Though at the same time so much of the rest of the rationale actually resonated with my own experience, I’ve just not found the destination we’re at quite as bleak.