The Ritual of the New

Refresh refresh refresh... 

It is the first fresh episodes of the new network television season.  You're scoping out new shows to try, and you're ready to get back to your favorites. You've been waiting all summer, seeking the spoilers or avoiding them, as you wish. You've read the TV Guide Fall Preview and the Entertainment Weekly fall issue as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls, and you're divining meaning. And you've hit the various message boards throughout the Internet, discussing what's going to happen. 

The minute the show ends, you'll be back on the boards, discussing what you've seen and what those "next on" scenes mean. 

This is now. 

Back in the days before the Net, the fall ritual for TV watchers was still the TV Guide Fall Preview but that was almost all there was, outside of an occasional article in your local paper.  From that, you could maybe find out what was happening with your favourites and try to decide what shows would be worth catching and learn when were they airing, because that was important. The show aired once a week and it was a long time until rerun season.  

Once you had managed to catch it, unless you had friends who also watched it, you had no one to discuss it with. If it became a hit, your local paper or maybe a magazine might have an article about your favorite show, but that was the extent of things. 

When I got into fandom in the 80s, there were conventions and letterzines to discuss shows. Letterzines were the message boards of the day -- you subscribed by sending off a cheque to a fan or a small group of them, and you received the zine in the mail and started to participate yourself. Letterzines were full of letters of comment on the show and on the previous issue's letters, maybe a few articles or some short fiction. The organizer would collect all the responses sent in by the fans, collect them in a booklet or just a collection of pages, and mail them out to everyone. Then the process would begin again. 

I missed computer bulletin boards and Compuserve and Delphi and the start of Usenet. Of course, these became dominated by science fiction fans discussing their shows, because -- let's face it -- geeks are usually SF fans. The World Wide Web took off almost fifteen years ago. I got on in 1997 as an X-Phile, joined the main mailing list, known as the Chaos list and run off a list serv by a group of fans. The fan fiction archive was housed on Ohio State's servers. The more famous X-Files group was the Usenet group, alt.tv.x-files. It's still going strong, with some of the same fans who were there then. In the early days of the show, the producers haunted the group. By the time I got there, those days were gone, but one newsgroup had spun off others, adding dot creative, dot analysis, and dot xville. Waiting for mail to arrive was replaced by logging on and hitting "refresh" on the browser, waiting for the new comment, the new fan fiction to be posted. 

As would soon become the pattern for online fandoms, the Chaos list started turning into armed camps -- fans who still liked the show versus those who thought it was being ruined -- back in Season 4. The movie only aggravated things, and by the time David Duchovny left the show after Season 7, there wasn't much harmony left. Fortunately, this splintering coincided with the rise of eGroups, which meant you could create a mailing list without a list serv. eGroups eventually sold to Yahoo, and YahooGroups is still churning along -- in fact, I'm still on one of the groups that started in the wake of the big split in X-Files fandom. 

YahooGroups led to message boards, which have multiplied. I started reading Television Without Pity when it was Mighty Big TV. Now it's a juggernaut, owned by Bravo and ruled by moderators who seem determined to take the fun out of what used to be freewheeling discussions on almost every show on television. Still, it's a gathering point for a wide range of fans of shows from The Amazing Race to The Sopranos to Heroes. 

Along with TWoP, almost every network and cable channel has its own boards at their sites, and fans are setting up their own message boards for their favourites. Reality show sites even keep non-subscribing Big Brother fans up on what's happening on the live feeds.  

Then there's LiveJournal. If other bloggers are on their own sites, fandom is on Live Journal, posting fan fiction, and discussing shows, so much so that when LJ owner SixApart does insanely stupid things such as deleting accounts on the word of a child protection group that turned out to be one person gone a bit mad, SixApart finds itself inundated by fandom rising up (and mangled all over CNet and Valley Wag). 

While you're still hitting refresh, it's now at message boards, LJ communities,and even at network sites themselves. Miss your show these days and you can watch it online, on your iPod, on demand. This leads to the networks panicking as ratings slip and clamoring for new way to measure all those eyeballs watching the shows at times other than that once a week airdate. 

But while I'm hitting refresh, I'm still pulling out my TV Guide Fall Preview to keep track of the new shows. That's one ritual that doesn't change.  

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