There is yet another weird way to watch television.
People are sitting through one to two minute, out-of-order clips of TV shows and movies on social media, awkwardly cropped for the vertical format and often with terrible music blaring in the background or weird, unrelated text floating on the screen. They might watch them at double speed, look for other clips to find out what happens next, or gather in the comments to discuss.
“For me, it’s looking for those glimpses of joy and happiness when days are filled with so much stress, ” says Cristina Capello, 51, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. “If it’s a show that I love, I remember how I felt when I watched it. And then I get sad because I can never watch it again and feel that for the first time.”
For the people who watch, it’s a satisfying way to relive beloved shows, inspiration for finding their next obsession, or just a way to lighten the cognitive load that comes with making a decision. On social media, where the conversation is often as important as the content itself, these clips recreate something much older about television. Instead of waiting for the Sopranos to air every Sunday and discuss the next day at work, people can watch a clip of a new or old show and take it apart, discuss or bond over it in the comment section.
“Maybe that’s the dose that you need right now to get that little boost of whatever it is — whether it’s nostalgia or just a feeling of happiness,” says Cristel Russell, a professor of marketing at Pepperdine University.
Clips on social media are different from the newer vertical dramas that have been produced with phone scrollers in mind. They are shows made for traditional television with a deep catalog to pick from such as Grey’s Anatomy and West Wing, or newer titles like Netflix’s The Maid and Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty.
For fans, sometimes a brief clip of a well known, satisfying scene is just the right amount. A few in a row that recap one of a show’s best known plot-lines can scratch an itch and deliver an emotional impact, without having to devote an hour to a full show.
Russell has studied the different ways people consume television over the years, from binging to snacking and a host of other food metaphors. In one of her studies, she found one reason for tiny rewatches was that people were revisiting how they’ve changed since the last time they watched a show.
Binging was just one way TV watching had evolved, Russell discovered. Some people she studied were watching the last episode of a season first, or they would skip over plots with characters they didn’t care about, or only go to the episodes they enjoyed the most.
“In this digital age you can absolutely skip, move back, forth, pause, rewind, skip. People were very actively piecing-up the narratives in whatever ways they wanted, which was absolutely not always linear,” said Russell.
Algorithmic feeds put a new spin on that practice, but instead of seeking specific parts of shows or movies out, people are shown things without looking for it.
Capello wasn’t seeking out old shows. They just started showing up on her TikTok page one day. Now Capello, an executive director of cyber resiliency at a bank, will happily rewatch clips of favorite shows and movies that float across her social media feed. Some of her favorites to watch this way include The Devil Wears Prada, Ted Lasso, The Good Place, and Schitt’s Creek. But she’ll also discover new shows through clips and decide to go watch them the not-so-old fashioned way: on a streaming service.
These clips appear to walk the line between successful marketing and pirating, experts say. Some are posted by the streaming or distribution companies themselves, hoping to turn viral moments into first time or repeat watchers on other platforms. But others are shared without approval, and go to great lengths to avoid being taken down for copyright infringement or to get promoted with the latest trends. The tricks change, but have included adding loud music or soft voices from a different source, inverting the video, overlaying another smaller video of a random person’s face, and most recently popping distracting text on the screen like a list of five random words.
The lower quality doesn’t stop people from sticking with them. That’s in large part because they offer something modern television is lacking: community.
“It’s really nice to have that feeling of shared cultural experience. It’s really hard to have that nowadays when — especially in the binge model — you don’t know where someone’s at in the show,” said Zac Murphy, 28, the director of communications for a non-profit in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “You’re finding that community online. You find people that are engaging with the material.”
Murphy grew up immersed in online fandom culture, specifically for the shows Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock. Remixing favorite parts of the shows and making edits, then posting them online, has long been a part of loving a series. But many of the clips people are watching today are not fan edits, but also not enough parts to watch something in its entirety.
For Murphy, the clips will sometimes inspire him to watch something new for the first time. For example, a social media clip of Game of Thrones recently inspired him to do a full rewatch of the epic fantasy show (around 70 hours total). And if the regular social media comments of “What’s the name of this?!” are any indication, many other people are discovering them for the very first time.
While it’s similar to people choosing the bits and pieces of a show they love to rewatch, Russell says an unsettling new twist is that people have less agency when it’s just picked by an app. While like, save and watch metrics are high for many of these clips, there isn’t data to point to how common of a practice this is and if it poses a danger to streaming services.
“That’s the weird thing about algorithms,” said Russell. “You wonder, is this a universal experience or has the internet figured out that I’m very weird in a specific way?”
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