There is a television show I have watched the entire run of four times. It is a moderately well-known show that ran for several seasons. It is, by my own honest assessment, a good show but not a great show — it would not make most lists of the best television of its era and I am not going to argue that it should. What I am going to argue, in this entry, is for the practice of rewatching, and specifically for the practice of putting on the thing you have already seen and that you know exactly the shape of.
I am not going to name the show because the entry is not really about the show. It is about a category of viewing that I think is more important to a quietly contented week than the more prestige-oriented version of watching, where every show is supposed to be a new experience and every episode is supposed to be a meaningful expenditure of attention.
When the show goes on
The show goes on, typically, during the part of the evening when I am also doing something else. I fold laundry while watching. I prep vegetables for the next day. I respond to email. I write a list. I am not, when the show is on, paying close attention to it in the way I would pay attention to a movie or to a new show I had not seen before.
The show, in this mode of watching, is not the primary activity. The show is companionable background. The companionable background of a show I already know has a different quality than the companionable background of music, or of a podcast, or of nothing — there are people in it, and they are saying things to each other, and the things they are saying have a familiar rhythm that produces a particular kind of low-grade attentive ease.
I think this is part of what I have come to depend on the show for. It is not entertainment in the sense of producing surprise. It is not education in the sense of producing new information. It is the company of a small number of fictional people I know well, doing things I have already seen them do, in a way that has the texture of a long-standing acquaintance rather than the texture of a new encounter.
What the show is doing for me
I have thought about this enough that I have a couple of provisional theories about what the rewatching is doing for me. The first theory is the company theory — that the show provides a quiet form of social presence on evenings when I am alone in the apartment and not in the mood for actual social presence. The fictional people are not the same as actual people but they are not nothing. They are a kind of low-overhead sociability.
The second theory is the predictability theory — that the show provides a kind of cognitive rest by being completely predictable. I know who is going to walk through which door. I know what the running jokes are. I know which characters will say which kinds of things in which situations. There is no demand on the attention. The brain can rest in the show in a way that it cannot rest in something it is encountering for the first time.
The third theory is the long-relationship theory — that I have, over the course of four watches and at this point probably six or seven years, developed a kind of relationship with the show that is genuinely deepening over time. I notice different things on the fourth watch than I did on the first. The characters have shifted in my understanding of them. The plot, which I no longer track because I know it cold, has receded behind the texture of the writing and the smaller patterns of how the show works.
I think all three theories are partially right. The show is providing some company and some rest and some accumulated depth, and the combination of the three is what keeps me coming back to it on an evening when I could be watching something I had not seen before.
What the rewatching is not
I want to distinguish what I am describing from a more anxious or compulsive version of rewatching that I think also exists and that I have, at other times in my life, fallen into. The anxious version of rewatching is when you put on the same show because you cannot bear the small effort of choosing something new, when the rewatch becomes a way of avoiding the discomfort of any decision-making about how to spend the evening.
The version I am defending is different. I rewatch this show maybe ten or twelve evenings a year. I watch many other things — new shows, old shows, movies, nothing at all — on the other evenings. The rewatch is not a default. It is a specific choice, made on specific evenings, for the specific reasons I have described above. The choice has the deliberate quality that I think distinguishes a healthy practice from a compulsive one.
I notice when I am leaning on the show too heavily, and I notice when I have not put it on in a while and am due to revisit it. There is a kind of natural rotation, which I do not consciously plan but which has emerged over the years of rewatching, where the show comes up in the evening rotation at intervals that feel appropriate. I do not have to think about it. The body and the evening know when the show goes on.
The specific scene I always wait for
There is a scene in the show, in the third season, that I have come to wait for in a way that has become part of my relationship with the rewatch. The scene is between two of the secondary characters, in a kitchen, late in an episode that is otherwise about the main plot. The scene is short, perhaps three minutes, and it is one of those small scenes that the show could have cut without losing anything structural and that the writers chose to keep because it does something that the rest of the show was not going to do on its own.
The scene is about a small reconciliation between the two characters that the audience does not need to be paying attention to in order to follow the plot. The dialogue is quiet. The performance is restrained. The scene does not resolve anything dramatic. It simply allows the two characters to be in the same room for a few minutes and to find, in the way they speak to each other, a small and undramatic version of fondness.
I have watched this scene approximately twenty times across the four rewatches. The scene works on me every time, in a slightly different way each time. The scene is, in some sense, what the rewatch is for. The plot has receded. The minor scenes have become major. The show I am now watching is structurally a different show from the one I watched the first time, because the things I am paying attention to are different.
The case I would make for someone else
If someone asked me whether they should pick a show to watch four times, I would say not exactly. I would say that the practice is not really about choosing a show that you intend to rewatch. It is about giving yourself permission to come back to things that have been good company without feeling that you have already extracted the value of them.
Most of the value of most shows is in the rewatch, I have come to think. The first watch is for the plot. The second watch is for the dialogue. The third watch is for the performances and the small directorial choices. The fourth watch, which I am currently in the middle of, is for the texture of the thing — the rhythm of the editing, the way certain rooms are lit, the running patterns in the writing that you do not notice when you are tracking what happens next.
I am going to put on an episode tonight, probably while I sweep the kitchen and put away the dishes from dinner. It will be an episode I have seen four times. I am looking forward to it. The looking-forward-to is not the same as the looking-forward-to-a-new-thing, but it is its own particular pleasure, and I have come to think that pleasure is one of the small reliable goods of an evening in a small apartment in a small town in the middle of a long winter.
