Watch out for snakes

on Gogglebox and vicarious participatory media

When I first saw the Comedy Central show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in the early 1990s, I was most likely home on holiday break, because I didn’t have access to or interest in cable television at college. The premise of the show is that you watch a group of friends watch a bad movie and make fun of it, and I remember thinking it was slightly pathetic to have to turn to TV for that experience. I didn’t need a show that simulated the experience of having friends; I lived with friends, worked with friends, ate nearly all my meals with friends, was continually in the midst of friends, and there was no shortage of sarcastic commentary and inside jokes about whatever we encountered.

Seemingly aware of the innate pathos of its premise, Mystery Science Theater represented its group of friends not as a cool clique you could vicariously join but as a single man isolated in outer space who has been driven by loneliness and inadequate entertainment media into building himself “robot” puppets to talk to. (It prefigures the current vogue for pushing chatbot companionship.) A few years later, after I graduated and moved across the country to an alien city where I had no friends and spent nearly all of my time alone, I became a fervent viewer. I had dozens of episodes on VHS, recorded at SLP speed to fit three per tape, and most nights I would fall asleep with one of them playing. Some of the jokes still recur in my mind unprompted when I’m cued by certain phrases or names, a sad mode of self-soothing that has become permanently embedded in me.

Mystery Science Theater achieved a cult status in the 1990s, and one could read in press coverage of the show about how people would get together in their own groups every week to watch it. But this never was my experience and it never made sense to me; the show felt like a substitute for and not a facilitator of sociality. I understood it as being about alienation (I can’t find straightforward relief in what the world offers to amuse me) and coping with the ensuing isolation. It shows an attempt to wrestle entertainment media into being a kind of conversation partner and not just a sedative. I saw it as modeling not so much collective experience as a mode of quasi-Brechtian nonpassive consumption, in which you refused identification with a film’s characters and situation, and resisted getting caught up in a story but instead stood aloof, assessing with irony and occasional sympathy what a movie was trying and invariably failing to do.

Mystery Science Theater illustrated in a backhanded way how hard it was to make entertainment and, accordingly, how hard it is to entertain ourselves, to be entertained, how much work we ordinarily have to do to allow entertainment to work on us, covering up for its mistakes and implausibilities, embracing its stereotypes, and fleshing out its formulas. The show frequently zeroed in on the incompetent attempts made by marginal production companies to mimic slick entertainment products, and it elevated these failures into a kind of found folk art, as though a kind of genius could be spotted when you learned to look at things with the right kind of cynicism. It basically depicted camp sensibility in action, which felt like a consolation prize for a more general cultural exclusion.

But even as Mystery Science Theater discouraged vicariousness with respect to the movies it mocked, it generated it at a different level, with viewers being invited to identify with an idealized audience and see themselves as part of a community of elites who could see through culture industry pabulum while besting it at its own aims. This never seemed like a potentially real community to me but a fantasy one: You could imagine yourself not as a character in the film but one of silhouettes in the theater seats at the bottom, one of the show’s true stars. Being in the audience was presented as preferable to being onscreen; the show dramatized the audience’s presumed power, its claim on the last word about any entertainment product and its ability to draw on deeper pools of knowledge and feeling, and ultimately its transcendence of the need to explain or defend itself.

At the same time, the audience onscreen did the watching and enjoying for you, saving you the trouble of having to pay close attention yourself. Through the show, viewers were able to consume “watching TV” as an activity without having to perform it; it made viewing more passive than it already was, more passive than passive,
”hyperpassive,” as Baudrillard might say. You watch in the same way as before but can believe that now your watching somehow expresses a criticality toward the idea of merely watching things.

Relatively early in MST3K’s history, Comedy Central made this behind-the-scenes promo documentary about the show, which, if I remember right, first ran during one of the “Turkey Day Marathons” when the channel would air something like 15 of the two-hour show’s episodes in a row. Ostensibly the documentary was meant to expand MST3K beyond its cult status, but at the same time, it seemed intent on proving the opposite point, that the audience for a show like this could never scale, that chasing popularity was antithetical to its existence.

One line from Joel Hodgson, the show’s creator and primary star, sums this up: “We never say who’s going to get this; we always say the right people will get this.” This line was in the commercial for the documentary, which ran as MST3K aired and thus ended up on my VHS tapes and lodged in my brain for life, perhaps to my detriment. It expresses the quintessential Gen X anti-populism, the suspicion of pandering to audiences or trying to be “relatable” in a general, nonspecific way. It also captures the idea of an aristocracy of taste, built on being able to “get” certain kinds of ironic humor and camp sensibility. The show’s detractors naturally regarded it as elitist and irony-poisoned, if not fully nihilistic, because it problematized people’s supposed naive enjoyment of media.

Looking back, it’s clear that this was a core contradiction of the 1990s, traceable not only in MST3K but in other highly reflexive entertainment products of the era, like The Larry Sanders Show, or Nirvana and the ensuing flowering of alt-rock radio, or grunge fashion and the ethos of “my image is I have no image”: It was a moment in consumerism when being a conforming nonconformist seemed especially viable, when mainstreamish media products could try to sell themselves as being too complicated for the mainstream, when being “anti-commercial” was understood as having a lot of commercial potential. It seemed like a central cultural dilemma, how to avoid becoming popular while also becoming popular. (The internet would turn it inside-out, making popularity the only remaining measure of reality.)

Whether or not I would have admitted it to myself then, I really wanted to consume authenticity through these kinds of semi-popular things that seemed to embody “not selling out,” and then later I felt like I wanted to repudiate that whole period of my life and the empty comfort of having tastes that I needed to believe that nobody else shared. I came to realize how that whole orientation depended on a stable cultural backdrop, a set of banal but integral shared values, that I was perhaps too quick to take for granted.

I was thinking about this because while I was in Ireland last week I happened to see a show on a British network that put the basic premise of MST3K to what seemed to me a different end from self-isolating irony. This was Gogglebox, a reality show that has apparently been on for a decade or so and consists of “ordinary people,” noncelebrities who appear to have been selected to be demographically representative, watching and responding to other popular TV shows. Whereas MST3K presents its surrogate audience as shadows, on Gogglebox, we see the designated viewers from the perspective of their television, sitting in their living rooms on couches and easy chairs, eating their snacks and sipping their beverages, making wise cracks to each other as they watch clips of shows we’ve presumably also seen. There is no presumption of “indie cred” to it, no implication that making fun of TV makes you some kind of outlier. Instead it gestures toward the idea that watching TV is something that normally brings households together in a spirit of light-hearted skepticism.

I don’t mean to overly romanticize I show that I saw only three episodes of, but nonetheless, Gogglebox came across to me as easy to watch and nonchalantly charming, and I was surprised someone hadn’t tried a similar show in the U.S. But then it occurred to me that the show was utterly at odds with the U.S.’s media environment. Gogglebox seemed like an advertisement for the prosocial effects of media consumption: It posits a national audience, a fantasy mainstream to replace the monoculture that no longer exists, and shows that “we” all watch, defining that “we” as a melting pot including people from different races, classes, family structures, and regions of the country. No one is ever watching alone.

Gogglebox represents that normative audience not as a slavering fan culture overinvested in the stakes of entertainment products and willing to fight and humiliate people over them, but as people who automatically tend to put the absurdities of other reality TV shows, news digests, Netflix dramas, etc., into a proper perspective. Though the show models a kind of talking back to the screen, it also suggests that watching TV is a low-stakes distraction, not something to build an identity around.

Though Gogglebox seems a reaction to social media and reads in part as an attempt to incorporate the “second screen” back into the first screen, it also rejects the imperatives of the social media feed to direct the most attention to the most unscrupulous attention-seeking figures and to generate outrage, conflict, and emotional intensity that can keep people scrolling indefinitely. In that way it feels like pure nostalgia, what we might think “social media” was if the platforms were never launched. Like MST3K, it makes a passive spectacle of “audience participation,” but this doesn’t contradict or betray its purpose; instead curtailing and interrupting the viewer’s need to participate in media production at all times seems to be the point. The commentators onscreen are showing viewers at home how low the stakes are supposed to be.

According to Gogglebox’s Wikipedia page, the show’s producers “did not want to feature people who wanted to be on television” and sought potential cast members in unconventional ways:

One of the methods used to find participants is termed “street casting,” whereby the show's team looked in everyday public places; Leon and June were found in a bridge club, and Stephen and Chris were found in a hair salon. In later series, members of the show’s production team visited random houses and held up a card that contained something, such as a picture of the British Prime Minister or a Daily Mail headline, and noted how quick the person responded and any funny, interesting, or insightful comments they had.

I don’t watch a lot of social media video, but I have spent some time in bridge clubs, and Gogglebox seemed to owe much more to that vibe than to TikTok. It took me a while to put my finger on it, and perhaps some of it derived from my being a foreigner, but it was unusual to see people onscreen who weren’t begging for my attention. But it also didn’t feel like I was spying on them. It conveyed instead the impression of very different people who shared in common the permission to be themselves publicly from within the safety of their own living rooms, and that this permission didn’t produced the id-driven megalomaniacs of the anonymous internet’s content cesspools but fundamental civility. Gogglebox makes of TV shows a kind of common target that people can vent their skepticism on, so they don’t have to regard one another as entertainment to be similarly mocked or seek to become entertainers themselves to remain visible and seem worthy of respect.

Seeking attention for profit is perhaps incompatible with tolerance. The paradigm for U.S. television is the local news broadcast, full of sensationalized crime reports, fear mongering, petty grievances and suspicions, and weather. Social media platforms, in a reflection of their own prerogatives, tend to disseminate the idea that tolerance itself is intolerable and boring; they produce people whose personality revolves around being compulsively watchable. But society depends on people being considerate, largely predictable, and ignorable when necessary. Gogglebox seems intent on showing that those kinds of familiar, considerate people appear across the spectrum of social identities and they aren’t without a sense of humor. But for all I know, the show has already been cancelled.