There’s a lot of telly on at the moment. Over the past few weeks alone, there’s been new seasons of The Boys, The Bear, and House of the Dragon, all shows I keep up with. I’m also giving The Acolyte a chance, and at the moment I’m sitting somewhere in the middle with it. It’s not the disappointment of The Bear or the slow decline to mediocrity of The Boys, but as someone trying to get into Star Wars again after a long period of content fatigue, it’s fine.
Add into this my sports commitments: I like to watch as much of the Euros as possible, and two massive wrestling pay-per-views have provided hours of sports entertainment over the past fortnight.
Entertainment website Vulture recently recirculated a three year old article in which a writer comes up with an ingenious plan to get through all the telly you want to watch: watching it at 1.25x speed. “Daunted by trying to get through 121 episodes of ‘Lost’ now that it's on Netflix? Why not try doing it at 1.25x speed?” the site’s official account posted on social media.
The writer, who I won’t name as I’m sure they’re getting plentiful abuse for this absurd take already, says they listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed and watch Netflix shows at 1.25x. I get it for podcasts, since that’s just people talking. Speeding it up is just like having a conversation a bit faster. I do a similar thing with audiobooks, depending on the narrator. If a book has a slow narrator, I speed it up a little (although only as far as 1.25x). If the narrator talks too fast, I slow it down a little (around 0.75x is the maximum). It’s different for TV shows.
However, the author of the Vulture piece takes it a step further, guiltily admitting to “skimming the media universe”, whether that be skim-reading articles, skim-listening to podcasts, or skim-watching TV shows. This is a step too far for me.
You miss so much by skim-watching any TV show at 1.25x or even 1.5x speed. As well as the sped-up dialogue, you’ll miss subtle facial expressions from characters, you won’t be able to take in perfect shot compositions – there’s so much you might miss in a visual medium. Every panning shot and every -up is so intentional and measured that the editing process can last months as directors and editors piece together their show with utmost precision. The length of every scene, of every individual shot, is important. You miss all of that by speed-watching.
Worse than that, you’re denigrating the show you’re watching to meaningless ‘content’. Why are you watching things faster? To see more things. At least, that’s what the writer of the Vulture article says. There’s so much telly that you need to bastardise everything you watch in order to consume more.
This isn’t a healthy relationship with any media. It’s shallow. TV shows aren’t six-second TikToks to be scrolled through incessantly, consuming as many as possible. These aren’t GRWM storytimes. The point isn’t to watch as much as possible as quickly as possible. The point is to engage with the media you watch, listen to, read, or play. You’re supposed to take time to think about them and let it percolate in your mind.
This is a result of the binge-watching culture streaming services have cultivated. We smash through TV series so that we don’t get spoilers, so we can contribute to discussions, or so we can write about them for work (guilty). Watching them at 1.25x speed is just the next logical step in our need to consume as much ‘content’ as we feasibly can in our lifetimes.
You don’t have to take my advice, just as you don’t have to take Mr. Vulture’s advice. But I think you’ll enjoy media more, from TV shows to video games to books, if you take your time with it and actually try to engage with it. Use all that grey stuff sloshing around inside your noggin. Or, you know, I guess you could just watch a stuttering slideshow of The Godfather sped up 48 times using the fast forward button on your DVD remote. Just as Coppola intended.
