Dear Television held a symposium on Netflix, or the Way We Watch Now, at The Los Angeles Review of Books this week. I wrote about re-watching TV series as a practice with its own joys, limitations, and even aesthetics. And I close with a long-overdue ode to re-watching NBC’s The Office.
“Streaming may have artificially limited the canon, it may have provided an apparatus that fully realizes TV’s potential as background music, but it’s also made more astute, attentive viewers of a larger swath of the viewing audience…They are aware of texture, in other words, the results of aesthetic decisions if not necessarily the mechanics of those decisions, and they are aware of it because their shows exist in infinitely watchable, infinitely re-watchable, infinitely controllable time.”
Phillip Maciak 