After years of benign peer pressure from my sister, this week I finally started watching Gilmore Girls. It's a quick-paced comedy-drama from the 1990s, weirdly feminist in tone for its day, and I was immediately hooked and began to tweet. There are seven series to get through, and I shot thoughts into Twitter from my blank slate, such as how everyone talks very fast and gets up very early in this show. The replies rolled in faster than usual: I hadn't anticipated the popularity of the show.
The tweets, all cheerful, were laden with what could be considered spoilers. Dean is the worst. No, no wait, Jess is the worst. I am a handful of episodes into a seven- series saga and am already up to date with most of the lads Rory will date. And Lorelei. And a couple of redemption arcs, too. This all happened very quickly: not a spoiler alert in sight. But I didn’t really mind.
In fact, I probably won't even get to the end of Gilmore Girls: especially if I like it. I know this sounds perverse, but for me as a viewer, knowing what happens and seeing what happens are two very different things. Hearing what happens next, you can go back from. Seeing it, experiencing it, feeling it – the ending music for the last time, the final lines – that sinks deeper. The portal to the other world closes. That I can't handle. There's a difference between hearing that somebody is going to say goodbye and seeing their face as they say it.
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Small screen, big stories
I love television. From rolling, long sitcoms shot in a sound stage to big budget miniseries to the weird HBO experiments that got cut off after two seasons (I'm looking at you, Carnivale, you gorgeous monster), the expansive form of storytelling permits so much depth of narrative. A whole world to live in and to share with others; watching a show together is a more immediate bonding experience than the solitude of reading a novel, then the decompression after. Big stories on a small screen.
However, with the shows I love the most, I have never quite been able to make it to the end. I never saw what happened to Frasier Crane at the end of season nine. Clocked out of Community. Put a hold on Battlestar Galactica four episodes before the end. Bowed out of Game of Thrones, stepped out of Buffy early. Twin Peaks dropped out of the air at a climactic scene of horror, although David Lynch will bring us back to that creepy old town next year.
I never watched the last seasons of The X-Files, but dipped back into the reboot and felt strange and sad. Mulder and Scully estranged, their tension less romantic now that they're 25 years deep in disagreeing with each other and managing not to get shot. In all of these cases, I know details of the ends of these narratives, but I've never sat through them. I've heard spoilers, but in not participating in the end of a series, the work is never truly spoiled. The worlds stay open forever, for revisiting again and again.
In an article for the Atlantic, Jennifer Richler notes that as a consumer class, we struggle with spoilers because, "They remind us that a story is just a story. It's hard to get transported when you already know where you'll end up – in real life you don't have that knowledge."
In many ways, this touches on why we love storytelling so much. At its best, it can be totally transporting, pure escape. We project ourselves into the adventures happening on screen completely, and passionately defend our right to experience the twists and turns of plot with untarnished surprise. The internet brings spoilers at every turn, almost side by side with roaring spoiler alerts: a boundary preserving the authenticity of the viewer’s immersion in the story. Here be dragons; enter at your own risk.
The risk, as it happens, is minimal. Spoilers in themselves don't truly detract from our experience of story: in an article on the subject for the Guardian, Alison Flood notes a study from UC San Diego's psychology department that underscores this. Subjects of the study were presented 30 classic short stories: some with a spoiler paragraph that gave the plot away, others without, so the reader could go in cold. The research showed that the participants significantly preferred knowing the outcome of the story – especially if there was suspense involved.
Jonathan Leavett, of the team conducting the study, remarked that this could be because, “once you know how it turns out, it’s cognitively easier – you’re more comfortable processing the information – and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story”.
A nauseous distraction
There are so many different kinds of viewers and consumers of fiction, and I know this won't make sense for every viewer, but it rings deeply true for me. Without the nauseous distraction of anticipation, other details of the work can stand out further. I love walking back through well-trod episodes of The X-Files, only to glean new moments in the score, new nuances in the dialogue.
On my yearly excursion through Twin Peaks, I get something different every time, now that my heart isn't in my mouth over the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer. Once that pressure is removed, I can experience the textures of these shows differently. With the pressure of plot removed, the work changes. It feels less like a race to the end.
I call my mother to tell her about this idea, ask her what she thinks about spoilers. She's as big a TV head as I am, running back through Goodnight Sweetheart, Doctor Who, Inspector Morse and Midsomer Murders regularly. It turns out she hates final episodes too: the hard reminder that you can't live in that world any more because the story is over. It's about personal connection to fictional places and people: engagement with the work.
She says she just couldn't let Inspector Morse go after all these years, that she knows she can always go back to his investigations, even if the whodunnit element is no longer there. It's about comfort, she says. You can know it's over without having to feel that it's over.
My sister gets on the line to ask where I'm at with Gilmore Girls. I say episode eight, series one. I tell her I can't stand Paris, the overachieving bully at Rory's new school. "Paris is my favourite character," she begins, "Here's why . . . "
I let her spoil it for me. I can’t wait to see how it turns out.
