Welcome! It was the week when the possibility of a writers' strike continued to loom. It was the week when the same things just kept on getting made. And it was the week when the promise of a new 3.5-hour movie was either good news or bad news, depending on how you think about it. Let's get to it.
Spoiler alert -- it's different out there these days
When I first saw the first four advance screeners of this season of Succession -- and this is where you should duck out if you haven't seen it and still plan to watch it -- they came with the usual reminders not to spoil anything. But they came with another request, too. On top of not spoiling what would actually happen, the email suggested not telling people that this or that episode was a particularly important one. You know -- "Hey, people who watch this show, SOMETHING BIG happens in this episode!"
Makes sense. Even that kind of hint tips more than the show intends to tip; even that interferes with viewers having the level of surprise that I got when it finally sunk in that Logan had died. That's the approach I took in my review. Didn't say the third episode was important; didn't say any one episode was important.
Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy and Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy in "Succession" / HBO Max
But of course, when the episode aired, it touched off a new round of conversations about spoilers. Most of them were about how long you have to wait to participate in public conversations in a place like Twitter. Are you obligated to say nothing until the thing has aired on the west coast? Meaning that in the first moments, when you most want to talk about the show, you shouldn't? How about waiting until the next day? Lots of people think it should be the next day. Some think several days. Or a week. And in this case, very understandably, people who inadvertently found out something they didn’t want to know because other people didn’t wait long enough were really mad.
The problem with the way a lot of people define spoilers is that it's entirely subjective. It's not about whether something is a spoiler by definition; it's about whether it's a spoiler to you because you haven't watched yet. (Even people who set general rules like "How about 48 hours?" are often doing that because ... they need about 48 hours. It's understandable!) There are people who think the zipped lip should last forever, who believe you should never talk about a plot development in anything without a warning. New people discover things every day. Who are you to ruin their surprise? (This is what you might call the Darth Vader Is Still A Spoiler theory.)
There are a couple things that are pretty easy to do as spoiler avoidance that seem like common courtesy to me. I don't publish things with spoilery headlines for a good while, if ever. (You'll notice the headline of this essay is not "All The Stuff We Learned About Spoilers When Logan Roy Died In The Third Episode Of The Fourth Season Of Succession." That's on purpose.) I didn't tweet as soon as that episode aired, "THANK GOODNESS NOW YOU ALL KNOW LOGAN DIED!"
That's partly because, as much as my answer tends to be that you need to watch things when they air if not being spoiled is really important to you (and it does), not everybody is equally able to do that. Sometimes it's about how many services they can afford to be subscribed to at any given time, sometimes it's that they had to work a night shift or take care of a kid and they couldn't plunk themselves down in front of HBO just then. Things happen; there's no reason to go out into the world spitefully spoiling things on purpose just to prove that you think it's fine to do it.
But conversations we all have about the movies and TV that we love are also worth protecting. They make us smarter, they're fun and funny, and they're ways to talk to new people. It's all a balance, because as I was saying to reporter Leslie Gray Streeter this week, the shows that people are eager to talk about tend to be the same ones other people don't want to be spoiled about. There's no way to force your entire social media community not to talk about things in front of you; there is only courtesy. And you can't ask courtesy to extend so far that you have the experience you want at the expense of other people having the experience they want.
It's not an easy problem to solve. Because in the wake of the Succession episode, one of the things I thought was, "I wish people knew which episodes were going to have big things happen, so they could stay off Twitter until they'd seen them." But that's not a new idea, of course. That's what's behind the episode-specific "I'm not going to tell you what it is, but SOMETHING BIG happens in this one" warnings that, as we've already discussed, can spoil the surprise all on their own.
So this is my advice: If it's really important to you not to be spoiled on something, do the best you can to make it appointment television for yourself and watch it when it's on. No other solution is nearly as effective as that. Everything else is a half-measure, unfortunately. But if you can't do that, mute a couple of the biggest hashtags that people use for talking about particular shows. (For example, #Succession and #SuccessionHBO.) It's not a perfect solution, but it will help some. (Of course, if you're tweeting about a show, try to remember to tag your tweets!)
Or just give Facebook or Twitter or whatever a little bit of a break. Because the same excitement that you feel that makes it so hard when you get spoiled is the same thing that makes people want to go find "OMG" GIFs as soon as something important happens. And for good and for ill, that won't change on either side.
Newsletter continues after sponsor message
We Recommend
I think I recommended the If Books Could Kill podcast episode about Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus in this space a while ago, but that's not going to stop me from recommending their episode on Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Because wow.
If you're not yet caught up on the prospects of a WGA strike (which seem to me to be pretty significant), NPR's Mandalit del Barco has a piece that might help.
Sarah Weinman wrote a very good piece last weekend about truth and true crime, and even if these seem like well-covered topics, give it a read -- she's one of the genre's real experts and enthusiasts.
What We Did This Week
Nicholas Hoult as Renfield and Nicolas Cage as Dracula in "Renfield" / Universal Pictures
You received this message because you're subscribed to Pop Culture Happy Hour emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002
