I Love A Hate-Watch. Don’t You?

Why do we give our precious time to TV shows we can’t stand? Alissa Wilkinson considers our turbulent relationships with the silver screen and theorises as to why we can’t look away.

When it premiered in 2017, I quite liked The Bold Type, a television series about three 20-something women working at a fictional magazine called Scarlet. Although the show could tend toward after-school special, with the characters learning important lessons about speaking your truth, facing your sexuality or getting regular gynecological examinations, its heartwarming conventions – young women living their editorial dreams in the big city – worked their magic on me.

My love began to curdle during the third season. That’s when a new guy is brought into the office to spearhead Scarlet’s weirdly late foray into online publishing (it was set roughly in 2019). For reasons I couldn’t fathom, he referred to the magazine’s website as “The Dot Com”. Over and over and over again.

To someone who’s spent her career in digital media, this was a bridge too far. It suggested that the show’s writers hadn’t ever worked in this world, hadn’t talked to anyone who did, maybe had never read a magazine. My annoyance grew in the fourth season, as the star columnist (a fount of bad ideas) got “her own vertical,” by which the show meant “a blog.” What was going on?

I found myself declaiming to friends and colleagues about how deranged this turn of events was. I kept watching, but only to get annoyed at the things that I used to excuse as creative license: plot holes, improbable couplings, messed-up New York City geography. What I’d once enjoyed, I now hate-watched.

Hate-watching is a weird thing. There is so much to see, do, hear, read: Why spend precious time, in an age of nearly infinite media, plopped in front of a bad show to pick it apart? It’s like gorging yourself on a disgusting meal not because you’re hungry, but because you want to gripe about it later. Or taking a vacation with someone you find excruciating, not because you don’t have any actual friends, but because you want to bellyache afterward about all the stupid things they said and did.

Yet hate-watching is now part of the cultural conversation and arguably contemporary life. Chalk it up to morbid curiosity: We start watching a show because it looks appealing, but we keep watching because we want to complain about it at happy hour. It’s fun to be the person who describes a particularly terrible story arc or performance to our friends’ disbelief. Besides, it’s better than whatever is on the news.

I’m not talking about guilty pleasures here. This isn’t entertainment that we know is bad but that scratches some indefinable itch – your Love Islands, your Girl Meets Worlds. You could hate-watch those shows, I suppose, but what’s the point? They’re too good-natured to merit a tongue-lashing. It feels mean, and unnecessary.

No, you can only hate-watch a show that you theoretically should have loved – entertainment the algorithm pushed at you because it aligns with your tastes, an offering with a modicum of ambition behind it. It doesn’t even have to be a “watch” at all. You can hate-read books (better yet, a series of books), hate-listen to a maddening podcast, hate-scroll a social media feed that makes you stabby with superiority. But television is particularly well suited to this behaviour, perhaps because you can hate-watch it while hate-perusing the influencers you schaden-follow on Instagram.

My hate-watches lure me in with subject matter I’m attracted to (generally, women trying to make it in a challenging world) and a slick production value that often suggests an HBO-sized budget. Then I’m confronted with reality: The show – say, Spinning Out, an illogically plotted Netflix series about a hot mess of a figure skater – is terrible. It’s masquerading as something made for me, but it’s rotten at the core, and I’m going to watch it anyway, and its makers and marketers probably know that.

Your personal hate-watch might centre on frontiersmen, zombies, finance bros or blind romances, but the principle is the same: You can only hate what could have been great. You hate it more because it’s getting shoved at you by an algorithm. And in fact, someone else might unironically love your hate-watch. It might even get nominated for Emmys.

That means that hate-watching is in the eye of the beholder. It’s also a fairly recent phenomenon, one that the flexibility of streaming services, unbound from the strictures of TV schedules, further enables.

Yes, hate-watching predated streaming dominance. The New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum popularised the phrase writing about NBC’s Smash, which premiered in 2012, back when there were far fewer platforms, and linear TV channels still tended to air shows first. But now, when you can binge a lousy season in an insomniac haze, or flick on a show while you play Tetris on your phone, or just catch up with an episode on your own timetable, the temptation to alternate your eye-rolls with the “play next” button can prove irresistible.

Hate-watching is a close cousin to doomscrolling, that peace-destroying ritual endemic to the screen-addicted. A doomscroller marinates in everything that’s shown to them by their social media platforms of choice, whether it brings them joy or makes them grind their teeth. The latter is much more likely. Whereas social media feeds once showed you what people you already knew and liked were up to, now they’re seemingly set up to trigger your fury. That’s what keeps your thumb gliding up the screen.

Tech companies recognise an unfortunate truth: incentivising our worst impulses is far more lucrative than harnessing our best ones. In this context-free void, an eyeball is an eyeball, whether the brain behind it is being flooded with dopamine or adrenaline. A click is a click, whether you’re glad or mad.

And as Hollywood increasingly pivoted toward streaming, the logic of the internet took over our entertainment, too. A streaming platform’s goal is to keep your device on and subscription dollars rolling in (and for the increasing number of ad-supported platforms, that’s how they sell ads, too). That requires loyalty, of course – but the impulse behind that loyalty is irrelevant. As long as we keep watching, who cares?

That’s not to say that they’re purposely making entertainment just to drive you crazy. It’s just that hate-watching and love-watching, in the eyes of a streamer, are the same thing.

There are plenty of reasons to avoid hate-watching. It will mess up your algorithm, for one, and soon you’ll only get recommendations for similar shows, which presumably you’ll also hate. It is also the kind of behaviour, like doomscrolling and replying to trolls, that feeds our less charitable instincts. The more we do it, the more it becomes a habit, a negative approach to the world. We start to expect to be mad, even crave the feeling, and that cynicism spills over into more than just our TV diet. It’s fun in the moment, but it does leave you with something of a hangover.

But if I’m preaching here, I’m preaching to myself. Will I watch the rest of Emily in Paris? Of course. Do I anxiously await the new season of And Just Like That …? You betcha. At the end of an exhausting day, when I need to distract myself from my anxieties, sniping at some new, terrible show about ice skaters or lifestyle journalists or advice podcasters feels like comfort food.

After all, hate-watching something is not really the opposite of loving it. When I hate-watch the new season of The Real Housewives of New York City, I’m really expressing my own fandom, albeit a twisted one. A fan loves; a hate-watcher loathes but is irrevocably attached nonetheless. If I really don’t like a show, I just stop watching. To borrow a sentiment, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Alissa Wilkinson

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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