Ok so our generation is constantly accused of having what could possibly be the shortest attention span humanity has ever had (I might be exaggerating. I might not be. You can’t prove it! *side eye*… moving on). So in this era of 140 characters, what does that mean for our entertainment?
I was recently watching an interview where one of the participants says, and I paraphrase, that “Shorts are the future of media because the attention span of people today is constantly decreasing“. We are not even talking about shorts but that’s one point of view as to why there is so much more attention given to series than movies (it seems).
It is still not the best argument out there because technically movies are shorter. Most shows are hour long shows which result in approximately 43 minutes of pure content without commercials. Movies average 90 minutes and even though they are technically longer, when you are done with a movie. That is it! Issover!
The majority of people consume a lot of TV and follow a lot of shows. Taking myself for example, I personally am not the least busy of humans yet I follow an embarrassingly large amount of TV shows… and that’s if we are counting American TV series only (let’s not go into the Youtube Webseries, the Korean dramas, the irokotv series, et. al.).
However, I am still not an outlier. You’ll find that it seems that more people are watching more shows today than movies. This is quickly evident by a simple search on social media for Nigerian film/movies/entertainment and television. You will find that shows like Jenifa and AM Hush continue to dominate the conversation.
TV shows, more than movies, self advertise. It is much easier to start a following for a television series (think Gladiators, Hushians – or whatever people who watch Hush are called, Shuga-rites — ok so maybe I’m making the names up now) than it is to do that for a movie. For a television series, the love is re-validated every week. Unlike movies that are a one and done affair, after which you are left to reminisce.
For TV shows you can get together and plan watching parties (see TV shows helping your relationships). You see it trending at the same time every week. The word of mouth is intense. You can count on it coming back weekly and then in the summer of course it goes off the air for a while allowing you to miss it before it comes back (it’s like the ever elusive boyfriend you love to hate).
TV shows are becoming bigger creators of celebrities than movies today. This probably has to do with the fact that TV shows hit you at home, on your couch, for FREE and they keep coming back week after week. So much so that by the time the show is over, not just the main characters but even the minor characters are familiar faces.
There’s a reason for Netflix’s boom post “House of Cards”. There is a reason why iRoko TV (that was created on the platform of delivering movies) has a selection of TV series listed before recently added movies. There is a reason why Hulu can now afford to become exclusively a paid-service after they started curating their own TV content. For Pete’s sake, there’s a reason why the entire world (including people like me that don’t follow Game of Thrones) knew exactly when Jon Snow died and when he resurrected.
The reasons for the appeal might vary but it is hard to dispute that we are slowly, as a society, moving to a space where Television series are bigger than movies!
What do you think? Do you agree that TV is becoming bigger than movies?
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