Post-Game Shows For TV Shows
We watch people talk about sporting events after the fact…
I don’t know about you, but after a big sporting event happens, I almost always watch at least part of the post-game show. On one hand, this seems counterintuitive. I mean, I’m watching people talk about the game I just spent hours watching. On the other hand, it makes total sense. I want someone to help make sense of what I just watched. And to relive it, in a way.
Fundamentally, it’s the same reason why I read movie reviews after I see a movie (never before). I want someone to break down what just happened. And to see if my point-of-view aligns with others — or doesn’t, in which case, I may have missed something. Mainly, I’m thinking about the movie so I want to see what others are thinking about the same movie.¹
In more recent years, with the emergence of great television, it has become a thing to read re-caps of shows after they air, live. And so it could not be any less surprising that these worlds are now colliding, and we now have post-game shows for… shows.
With the launch of season two of Stranger Things on Netflix — which, two episodes in, is fantastic by the way — they’ve also pushed out a companion set of episodes to watch after the show. The slightly strange(r) thing here is that they want you to watch them after you’ve completed the entire season, versus just individual episodes.² But that’s in line with Netflix’s whole mantra. They want you to sit there and watch every episode back-to-back-to-back-to-back.³
Recap shows aren’t entirely new, of course. I think E! has been doing them for trash television for some time. HBO has both an “inside the episode” which airs immediately after every Game of Thrones episode, and also has showcased an “After the Thrones” show (produced by The Ringer) that was talking heads about the show. Same with “Talking Dead” after The Walking Dead, etc.
It’s this latter concept that most interests me. While the Thrones post-show didn’t succeed on HBO last year — it has since moved to Twitter — it’s actually compelling content in a weird, if slightly overblown way. For super fans of any show, they love this stuff. But we’re not to the point yet where a sports-like post-game show would seem “normal” for most television shows.
But I think we’ll get there.
As such, I think it makes a lot of sense for these shows to reside elsewhere — be it Twitter, Facebook, podcasts, or whatnot — at first. I wonder if these things can’t start in those “JV” leagues, and eventually move up to air after the show around which they’re based, just like the post-game shows in sports.
What I mean is that obviously you don’t know a show will be a hit when it first launches. And so it makes no sense to have a fan/expert-based post-game show right off the bat. But after a show achieves cult/hit status, it makes a lot of sense, for a lot of people. And so you start it online in some capacity. And then you take it more mainstream if the show achieve such status.
This reminds me of an idea I laid out years ago for Twitter to become the de-facto commentary layer for any and all television content. That is, entice creators to talk about their shows on Twitter as they air on television. Even better, make it easy for users to “play back” such commentary for when they watch said content on their own time. This would be the newfangled director commentary track. Or, at the very least, a great way to entice a user to re-watch something. To go deeper.
I just think about how much joy I get out of watching sports post-game shows and director commentaries with movies, and I’m realizing I get the same basic joy out of something like “Talk the Thrones”. And there’s no reason why every show shouldn’t have such a thing. Maybe not on TV, but online. And maybe eventually on TV too.
Part of it is why we all like watching shows like Game of Thrones or Westworld with friends. To be able to talk and debate about it afterwards. But it’s not always practical to do that. People are busy and there are now so many good shows to watch. But it’s totally practical to watch a show about the show you really love. I suspect we’ll see a lot more of this.
Imagine a show like Game of Thrones with both a “pre” and “post” game show. The “post” is already happening. The “pre” is just a matter of time…
¹ To that end, is it crazy to think that there’s a market for movie reviews that assume the person reading has seen the movie? Right now, they’re all predicated around helping a reader make a choice about whether or not to see a movie in the first place… We need a “post-show” type thing for film…
² I think this is a mistake, by the way. I think they should offer up these re-cap shows as an option after each show. These could easily pop-up on the screen when they alert you that you’re about the play the next episode. Sometimes we want to pause and think about what just happened. Or sometimes we’re starting up a new episode after a hiatus and need a refresher course…
³ Am I insane or is the “wait” time between auto-advancing to a new episode now far shorter than it once was?
