I watched Lost 15 years after it came on TV and because of that I missed out on one of the best things about a show like Lost. I couldn’t go to the message boards and see what everybody was saying about it. Not that they were not message boards when the show came out still buried out there somewhere. But the thing is is that in order to find a Lost message board by then you really had to look for it. Luckily a good friend of mine was a major Lost fan and he gave me a lot of insight and fun stuff about the show years after the fact.
There are a lot of people like me out there. Someone looking through peacock might start Battle Star Galactica and think wow what a great episode. I wonder what’s gonna happen next? But he or she can’t just call a buddy and say wow can you believe what just happened on the show? Not unless they are watching it too. Well there is a place where anybody can watch a show out of time and still have that experience. It’s called TV Time.
What is TV Time
TV time is a website that allows people to pull up message boards about tons and tons of shows and see memes based on the episode see how people reacted and see what people like didn’t like. This allows them the same kind of shared experience you get following a current show. You can see if other people felt the same way that you do just like we can now with a show that we’re watching at the same I am as a bunch of people we follow on Twitter or something.
It was really interesting looking at multiple reactions to say the first episode of Arrow on CW. Anybody who wants to can watch the entire run of the series on Netflix and with resources like this they can vent and see if people rant about characters they don’t like and whatever else. Did you think something was funny? There might be a meme waiting for you. Are you crushing on someone? Well so is everyone else. And the best thing is, you have to click a button that says you have seen an episode before the comments show up, so you won’t get spoilers.
In a way it can give a cord cutter or streamer a sense of community like what we would think of as the old days. Sociologist say that we no longer have the water cooler conversation anymore and that something is lost when people aren’t watching destination television and then talking about it the next day. Instead we say things like have you watched this show on Netflix have you watched that show on Amazon. Or we say where are you in the show now? That’s different. But TV Time really does fix that. It feels so current to see a meme or something you just watched even if the show was out nine years ago.
Disney is trying to rebottle that kind of emotion of immediacy by releasing the Mandelorian weekly, at least during the first run of a season. This helped Disney+ or Baby Yoda win the Internet. Every week there were new memes based on each episode that have now been turned into YouTube slide shows of their own. This might not have happened if someone ripped through the whole show in 2 days.
But now, if you never saw the Mandalorian you can still react with lots of other people episode by episode like a guide book. even better so can someone 5 years from now. Now that I have found this website I am totally going to look at reactions to older shows I’m checking out. If I can’t spend time with other people right now at least I can pretend we are all doing the same thing at the same time.
