I got a text message from a friend last week. He was inviting me to watch a television show at his place. The message, at first, was baffling.
“Want 2 H8 watch a show?”
I initially had no idea how exactly to parse that message. What did it mean to “H8 watch” something?
“Dude,” my friend said when I did the old-fashioned, hopelessly geriatric thing and called him up, person to person. “You’ve never heard of hate-watching a show?”
Hate-watching, he explained, was when you gather a bunch of COVID-19-free friends together in a party-like setting — snacks, drinks, comfortable cushions, plenty of social-distancing possibilities — and you all watch something you know is going to be truly terrible. The fun of it, he assured me, was the constant snarky comments and steady stream of catcalls from the assembled guests.
“It’s so much more fun than watching something good,” he promised me. “When it’s good, you have to be polite and pay attention and behave yourself. When it’s bad, you get to shout back at the screen, make fun of the actors, and laugh at the general badness of the product.”
Although I pretended otherwise, I knew exactly what he meant. I’m a writer, and all writers are the same in this respect. Authors hate-read other authors’ works. Journalists hate-skim other journalists’ punditry. Screenwriters hate-watch every movie they didn’t write. In other words, you can always identify professional writers by how unprofessionally they treat each other’s work.
My friend is a television writer, like me. And the guest list for the event, he told me, consisted entirely of our fellow scribes. The show we were invited to “hate-watch” was the premiere episode of a new television series on a streaming service — a show, to my knowledge, that hadn’t yet been released.
“I got an early copy of it,” my friend said. “I had a very similar project at the same place, and they chose this one over mine. My manager sent me a copy yesterday, so I thought, why not have some fun, get some people over to the house, watch the show together?”
“Are you sure this is healthy?” I asked.
“Totally,” he said. “Everyone has been tested a couple of times, and we’ve all been really careful.”
“I mean emotionally,” I said.
I tried to explain that hate-watching a project that edged out his own didn’t strike me as the most healing way to deal with a career setback. But on the other hand, it seemed basically harmless. My friend’s way of getting revenge on the other project — and, by extension, the other writer — was private, contained, and didn’t involve slashing car tires or calling in bomb threats, both of which have been known to happen.
I showed up at my friend’s house ready to hate the show that had beat his show out. I came prepared with caustic and nasty cracks about the dialogue, the characters, and the age and weight of the lead actors because, you know, I’m a good person and I wanted to support my friend.
What I wasn’t prepared for, unfortunately, was to like the show. It wasn’t perfect, of course (nothing is, except whatever I’m working on at the moment), but it was funny and fresh and had an interesting point of view. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
By the time that my friend had shouted his 10th or 11th insult at the screen, unaccompanied by any encouragement from his guests, it had become awkwardly obvious that the other writers felt the same way I did. We had come expecting to hate. We discovered instead that we loved.
It was, in other words, a terrible hate-watching party. Instead, it was an ego-deflating and spirit-crushing experience for my friend, in which he was forced to confront the truth that the show that won a spot on the air was not inferior to his at all. In fact, it was better.
There were still bowls of chips untouched and dip that hadn’t yet been dented. A couple of pizza boxes were full and unopened, steaming in their cardboard. A lot of the brownies were gone, but that was just because we all wanted to look busy when our host asked us what we really, really thought.
It’s not that great, we said tonelessly. Some moments didn’t work, we mumbled and shrugged. But he wasn’t buying it. He was experiencing the worst feeling possible, which is when you discover that your victorious competitors, the ones who bested you in the marketplace, deserved to win.
Turns out it’s more painful to hate-watch than to love-watch. The hardest thing to accept is that life is often fair.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
