Warning: this article contains spoilers.
(No, really. Just saying.)
Have you ever been in a room of people you knew, and you suddenly, innocently, blurted out the ending of a TV series that some of them were only catching up with now?
Did you let loose that Don Draper becomes a hippie and lives happily ever after on a commune at the end of Mad Men?
Did you point out that the passengers in Lost were actually the cast of Gilligan’s Island, sent through a parallel dimension portal?
Or have you ever spilled a major plot twist in a certain medieval HBO series that most people are addicted to and anxiously awaiting the latest season?
It’s not all your fault.
Some say we live in a Golden Age of Television.
I say we live in a Golden Age of Spoiling.
Look around on the Internet, and it’s hard to tiptoe through the landmines. Spoilers appear everywhere, on Yahoo, on Facebook, trending on Twitter. Everybody talks about the latest TV shows in obsessive detail, and if you’re not careful, you’re gonna catch some shrapnel.
When that happens, you’ve been “spoiled.”
I’ve been guilty of this habit myself for decades. Try as I might, I just can’t keep the genie in the bottle. Whether it’s revealing the killer in each entry of the Scream series or spilling the fate of Brody in Homeland, I find my mouth is moving before I even realize the damage that’s about to ensue.
People don’t like me for doing this. Understandably.
But I’m starting to realize: it’s mostly television’s fault. Now that TV shows are available on a “demand” basis (i.e., people get around to streaming or downloading or purchasing blocks of TV content whenever they have the time or feel like it), nobody’s ever on the same page. We all are mid-series in something, whether it’s House of Cards Season 2 (boy, that Zoe was really in a hurry to catch that subway train) or Game of Thrones Season 4 (boy, they sure killed off a lot of people).
The Game of Thrones situation got a bit hairy this season. (Well, hairier than usual, that is.) After interviewing a dozen cast members for HBO in a London hotel for the upcoming season, I was requested to “embargo” the article until the show premiered in the US in September. Wisely, I thought, I had read through the second half of A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin’s novel on which the fourth season is based, to get an insight into the characters for interviews. (That’s right: I spoiled the ending for myself.) You can imagine how difficult it was to not talk or write about the London trip, knowing that, out of the dozen actors we spoke with, three would be dead by season’s end. (I kept imagining black “X”s through them, sitting at the conference table.)
Then the media storm erupted over Game of Thrones 4 (it became the most watched season thus far), and every week, a new spoiler fest. But these were annoyingly vague spoilers, usually put up by Yahoo, that led you to read the articles against your better judgment. You were drawn into an interview with the actors playing Joffrey or Red Viper, for example, only to find out, in a cloying way, that they were looking for new employment next season. Spoiled!
It’s really because we no longer live in the age of the “watercooler” TV show — the one show that everyone talked about on Monday mornings, standing around the office agua dispenser. Back then, in pre-digital days, everyone had to wait around for each new episode to air. Like, for seven days! Then those ancient cave people would have the communal experience of actually sharing the latest series developments — together! As a group!
Now we have people leaking Quentin Tarantino’s future scripts online years in advance, or out-guessing the makers of Lost so they had to rewrite their own ending. People have abandoned that collective experience of “sharing,” along with any basic civility.
So now people know, or don’t know, what happens to Walter White at the end of Breaking Bad. At their own pace. In their own private world. You’re expected to be aware of everyone’s learning curve, which makes it very difficult to be a spoiler. How can you express enthusiasm about a show without pissing on someone’s parade?
So when I’m having an animated discussion on Breaking Bad, say, with a sister-in-law who is only on the fourth season, and she says something like, “I hear they’re going to do a sequel,” it’s hard to stop my mouth from uttering the words: “How are they going to do that, when the guy’s dead?”
End of discussion.
Or like the person who (perversely) posted on Facebook that she wanted to know the ending of this season’s Game of Thrones. Just had to know who dies before everybody else. (She hadn’t read the books, didn’t care to.) It’s because, she claims, she likes to jump ahead to the endings of books or hear the endings of movies, and she doesn’t mind having her experience “spoiled.” “Why can’t people understand that I like knowing the ending?” she wrote on Facebook. I replied that some people actually prefer to experience an unfolding narrative, over time, rather than hearing all the plot points spelled out like Morse Code. Something about the aesthetics of enjoyment, I said. She didn’t care. So, being a spoiler by nature, I shrugged and told her exactly who dies in Season 4 of Game of Thrones.
On the public Facebook thread.
And got a lot of horrified responses from others who had innocently stumbled upon the post.
D-oh.
That’s known as collateral damage.
I quickly, quietly removed my comment. But I know some people read it against their will. (I’m now on their sh*t list.)
What can I say? It’s just the age we live in. Information is hard to keep in the bottle nowadays. And in cyberspace, everyone can hear you spill