Remember your parents telling you about their childhood (or your childhood, you old git) and how they’d all make sure they were at home at a certain time to watch a specific show because that’s when it came on the tele? Insane. More or less devoid from reality, except for Love Island, or if you’re over 65 and can get your free bus home in time for Strictly Come Dancing. Oh and sport.
Sure, sport’s always had appointment tele, obviously. ‘Cause it’s live. Has to be that way. We were all there for man-child Luke Littler’s impossible run, we will be there for the Six Nations (maybe), the Euros, we’ll idly watch The Olympics in the background instead of doing work when it's 35 degrees outside. Sure, now that he’s got Sky+ your old man does record the games to watch in the evening, hoping to not hear the score beforehand, yes, but he always hears the score beforehand, doesn’t he and then lets the recording take up space and sticks on Only Fools and Horses, again, instead.
Anyway, it’s coming back. Appointment tele is coming back.
Whether or not you’re party to it, one of the only mindless, and only amusing parts of Twitter (X) right now is people losing their collective minds to live tele. Love Island paved the way, the revival of Big Brother, even Gladiators all got trending on the hellhole application website. But now there’s The Traitors.
The Traitors is a “psychological adventure competition” according to Google, where 22 people get housed in some castle in the Highlands and they do some challenges in order to win up to £120,000, instead of doing their proper jobs for a bit. But in true game show style, three traitors are secretly among them trying to fuck things up. People love it, and it’s very much rekindling the whole appointment tele thing once more.
But there’s more: the serial killer of appointment television series, Netflix, has decided that actually, appointment tele is quite good and they want a slice of it. This is probably because they do adverts on there now, and advertisers fucking love some appointment tele (all eyes there at the same time at once, is a good place to be plugging your latest sale on plugs or whatever) and Netflix can pocket some cash. It’s also about them wanting to be at the centre of community and tele zeitgeist and shit too.
The first foray into it will be at the end of February when they broadcast the SAGs globally, but there seems to be other plans in the pipeline. The WWE is heading to Netflix, and our bets are placed that they’ll want a slice of some sports tournaments soon too. Like how Amazon has.
Either way, you might be rushing home for Netflix soon. At least every other cunt will too.