Week-to-Week: Spoiler Culture is Dead, Long Live Spoiler Culture

Only YOU know whether this newsletter constitutes a spoiler, so open at your own risk

Photo: HBO

As soon as HBO chose to send the first four episodes of Succession’s fourth season to critics writing pre-air reviews, it created a litmus test for how online discourse treats spoilers.

On an individual basis, I would argue the results confirm critics still respect the premise of spoilers—details of “Connor’s Wedding” didn’t leak out in advance of the episode airing, with every critic successfully tiptoeing around the elephant [on the plane] in evaluating the beginning of the season. But the real test came last night, when the internet was hit with a full-on deluge of pre-prepared content surrounding the events of the episode precisely at 10:05pm ET.

The topic of spoilers is a complicated one—despite the fact I’m never going to directly say what happened on last night’s episode of Succession in this newsletter, simply discussing it in vague terms probably constitutes a spoiler by some definitions. Whatever we thought a spoiler was twenty years ago, social media changed the rules, in ways that we’ve never quite settled on. It’s been almost a decade since Netflix and the binge-release model made the last significant disruption in the ethics of spoilers, but we’re still having roughly the same discussion Entertainment Weekly’s Darren Franich started back in 2014. He attempts to set clear rules for every medium and release method, but argues that nothing has changed when it comes to weekly TV releases:

“The 24-hour grace period still suffices for the classical episode-a-week model. No putting the name of the character who died in headlines or in tweets. However, I would add an addendum to this rule: You are allowed to use codenames or hashtags or otherwise non-specific descriptors that refer to The Thing That Happened, like “The Red Wedding” or “Six Minute Tracking Shot” or “Tread Carefully Lightly.” After 24 hours, it’s open season.”

Obviously, the TV landscape has changed significantly since then with the explosion of streaming services ushering in an era of Peak TV where binge releases and non-linear viewing are increasingly dominant parts of the television experience. However, if we take a wider view, it has done nothing to shift the Overton Window when it comes to spoilers. Franich imagines an environment where we extend spoiler windows for binge releases, but only a few years later I was posting every Orange Is The New Black review the day of release, and spoiler-y interviews with actors whose characters died were emerging by the end of the weekend. How people watch television has objectively changed over this period, but the way we treat spoilers remains largely the same as the episode-a-week model, despite the fact that we’re talking about finding time to watch an entire season as opposed to just an episode. And on an episode-to-episode basis, the “24-hour” window is increasingly becoming, at best, 24 minutes.

In other words, while no individual critics had any desire to spoil Succession for viewers who had Sunday night plans, or were working an overnight shift, or planned to watch it linearly in a later time zone, the industry they’re in does not have a clear ethical position on this issue. After all, there are no ethics in search-engine optimization. Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk notes that writers have no control over how Google displays their articles, often choosing the SEO URL—which almost always contains spoilers to better capture searches from people who already know what happened—over the spoiler-free headline on the article itself. Meanwhile, Dan Fienberg at the Hollywood Reporter lamented that his initial headline was replaced with one that more directly hinted at the events of the episode, but ultimately that decision was not his to make.

I don’t know if online journalism has ever had an ethical stance regarding spoilers, but there is no doubt that the increasingly thin margins and commercialization of these environments has further removed any barriers to trying to capture every bit of traffic imaginable. While only the L.A. Times actively featured a spoiler in a headline, Vulture was posting excerpts from an interview featuring spoilers as a reply to their initial tweet only minutes after the episode finished airing, which is typical of their approach to sharing content but done here without extra consideration of context. Put simply, if you didn’t watch last night’s episode of Succession live and chose to be online, you probably put together what happened without much difficulty.

Now, as ever, we must acknowledge that no one agrees on what constitutes a spoiler—as I was writing this, Kathryn and narratology scholar Jason Mittell were having a lively back-and-forth about the degree to which spoilers negatively impacted one’s experience with this particular episode, and with TV stories generally speaking. It’s a meaningful conversation to have, but it’s an attempt to find common ground in a discourse deeply entwined with our neoliberal existence. It’s our personal responsibility to determine how important spoilers are to us, and how far we are willing to go in order to avoid them. I’m someone who tries to avoid all forms of spoilers, but I’ve had to accept Kathryn’s somewhat anarchist approach to spoilers in an era where I simply don’t have time to watch everything at the pace necessary to avoid any/all information about it. I’m sympathetic to those who felt that even warnings to watch last night’s episode live tipped them off, but the state of spoiler culture is such that I think critics were right to reveal something happened to offer the median best chance of experiencing the episode in the way they did.

Everyone seems to agree THIS level of anarchy is too far, but Kathryn makes some fair points.

That some critics felt this warning was necessary, whether before the season started or timed to this week’s episode, points to the tension between how spoiler culture has embedded itself within online journalism and the shifts in viewing patterns. And in thinking about the way things have played out over the past 24 hours, I would argue HBO’s insistence on weekly releases and appointment television may be single-handedly responsible for insulating spoiler discourse from the impacts of non-linear viewing, as there has always been a much-discussed corner of television where there is a built-in pressure to watch shows live. Much was said about Game of Thrones being the end of the “monoculture,” and certainly no show since has operated on the same scale. However, entertainment journalism has largely maintained the same breathless, immediate coverage of HBO’s marquee dramas in the aftermath, scheduling and positioning content in order to capture the most fervent viewers despite a smaller percentage of them likely watching the shows live. And as long as HBO shows maintained even a loose connection to their watercooler peak, there was little incentive for journalism to develop a new approach that reflected increased delays in viewing, effectively destroying Franich’s dream of a sliding scale of spoiler ethics.

And while there’s no question that viewers are far more likely to watch Succession or The White Lotus live than your average broadcast drama, the idea that you have to is fundamentally at odds with the broader trends of how people watch TV. The question becomes what happens when a publication or individual violates the ethical code of a given reader, which I have no doubt happened to a lot of people in the past 24 hours. It’s not like any reporter is going to get fired for revealing spoilers after an episode has aired, and it’s not like spoiled fans will rise up as an organized force to boycott an institution or unfollow a given journalist. Put simply, whether we consider the cynical side of garnering traffic or the productive view of engaging in conversation, the benefits of discussing something as soon as it happens has largely been determined to outweigh the costs to any one viewer, and it’s hard to imagine this changing any time soon.

How will you as a viewer/reader adjust your habits to account for this? That’s the question last night’s Succession pushes to the forefront of the next era of spoiler discourse.

Episodic observations

• For the record, although I don’t watch Succession and didn’t have screeners, I did do my part in protecting the secret after I edited Erik’s review and then my boyfriend predicted the twist, forcing me to bite my tongue.

• HBO may have let advance reviews watch it, but they did limit weekly screener access, and I suppose we’ll never know if word would have leaked out if they hadn’t locked down the episode to this extra degree.

• As I discussed with paid subscribers in a Recommendations thread over the weekend, I started Beef on Netflix, and am now finding myself facing down a week of conferencing in which I will fall behind the discourse, which I saw included some postmortems on the finale by Monday morning. The price I pay for only having time for two episodes!

• I’m staying with friends this weekend, and we did find time to check out Rye Lane on Hulu, which benefits from a brisk 82-minute runtime that makes this charming and stylish walk-and-talk romcom a breezy affair. At a time when TV episodes feel like they keep getting longer, a short movie really does hit the spot.