Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter
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Ditching the second screen
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Lately it seems as if everyone’s talking about “second screening,” the phenomenon where it’s just accepted that no one will be giving his or her full attention to a television show.
Producers of content for Netflix and the like are evidently being told to, essentially, dumb things down for viewers who will certainly be scrolling on their phones with just one eye on the TV.
“So many show runners (have been) given notes by the streaming channels: ‘This isn’t second screen enough,’” says British journalist Marina Hyde on The Rest Is Entertainment, the podcast she hosts with author/TV personality Richard Osman. “And what they mean is, the viewer is expected to be on their phone, sort of half doing something else, while your crime drama, or whatever, is playing.
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“You can’t make it as complicated as you have, because they’re not going to understand it. They’re not going to be concentrating on your show.”
Of course, you could argue that it’s a chicken-or-egg phenomenon — if TV shows were more compelling, complex and engaging, surely it would be impossible to look away. Maybe we’ve all started ordering new Stanley mugs and checking our likes on Instagram during shows because what’s on the less portable screen is merely background noise.
That argument does seem a little weak, however, at a time we’re still rightly calling the Golden Age of Television. You can’t tell me the creators of Better Call Saul or Slow Horses or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are catering their intricate plotting or motor-mouthed dialogue to an indifferent, distracted audience.
It’s just the siren song of the cellphone — that tiny addictive dopamine hit — can be stronger than even the most gripping historical drama or delightful rom-com.
But when we don’t give well-produced television our full attention, we’re not just short-changing ourselves of beautifully crafted stories — we’re stretching ourselves thin. Despite the charge of pleasure we get from checking our phones, it paradoxically triggers a stress response in the body, releasing cortisol and eroding peace of mind.
As Tanner Garrity puts it in InsideHook, “Mobile screen time, of course, hasn’t replaced TV screen time. It’s only added to it — and now, blended with it, creating a nightly blue-light-bonanza-binge that’s clearly interfering with our sleep and most likely intersecting with skyrocketing rates of social isolation and anxiety.”
We’re so bombarded by information all day long — why do we deprive ourselves of the chance to let a tale well told take us away from our busy lives?
Are you a second-screener or do you put down the phone when you watch TV?
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Jill Wilson
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Recommended
MOVIES: I always try to get through the full slate of Oscar-nominated best pictures before the ceremony, but quite often the films have not yet been released here, or never screened in local theatres. Such was the case with American Fiction, but luckily it came to Prime Video on March 9 so I could feel fully invested in cheering on this dry and deeply funny satire of the literary world (Jeffery Wright is typically stellar as the curmudgeonly lead character, an author whose high-brow tomes aren’t selling, and Sterling K. Brown was robbed of the Best Supporting Actor trophy, IMHO). The screenplay, adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, was a deserved win for Best Adapted Screenplay
Streaming services also make it a lot easier to track down other Oscar winners. For example, The Last Repair Shop, which took home Best Documentary (Short Subject) is available on Disney+. From the description, I thought it was going to be a sentimental, predictable tale about schookids bettering their lives via free band instruments, and it is that, but it mostly focuses on the folks who make those battered and abused tubas and violins sing again. It’s incredibly affecting.
What’s up this week
• The Arts team has your St. Patrick’s Day needs covered in What’s Up
• Freeze Frame International Film Festival winds up Saturday at Centre culturel franco-manitobain. Tickets at freezeframeonline.org; read about it here
• Local singer-songwriter-on-the-rise Fontine opens for Australian indie-folk band the Paper Kites at the Burt on Friday. Tickets at ticketmaster.ca.
• The Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir performs Sir Paul McCartney’s Ecce Cor Meum on Sunday at 3 p.m. at the St. Boniface Cathedral. The choir will be joined by soprano Andrew Lett, the Pembina Trails Voices’ Canemus, and musicians of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Tickets at thephil.ca.
• Whether you’re a Hufflepuff or Gryffindor, the Centennial Concert Hall is the place to be on Friday and Saturday night at 7:30 p.m., when the WSO performs along with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as part of BMO’s Night at the Movies, conducted by Evan Mitchell. Tickets at wso.ca.
• Tetris opens at Manitoba Theatre for Young People on Friday and runs to March 24. Erik Kaiel of Arch8 adapted the popular video game into a dance piece that was performed here in 2018. Tickets at mtyp.ca.
• Rise, Red River, a co-production from Prairie Theatre Exchange, Théâtre Cercle Molière and Article 11 runs at TCM to March 23. This drama, performed in English, French and Anishinaabemowin, was inspired by the work of Winnipeg’s Drag the Red. Tickets available at cerclemoliere.com.
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