What is everyone watching these days?
I’m currently watching a drizzle become a downpour. I’m staring at the green and brown patches of earth below the plane carrying me from New York to Atlanta. I’m witnessing my landlords renovate their patio from my bedroom window. Though, to be honest, by the time your eyes are looking at my words, I saw those things months ago. This essay has endured many stops and starts over the last year as I attempted to write myself out of a rut. The aim has always been the same “to do” item scribbled in my notebook: get this “watching” project off the ground.
The idea for this newsletter came to me last spring. It was one of those days when winter skies snap open and the sun beckons all of New York City out of hibernation. Bodies everywhere. Clusters of friends outgrowing their modest patches of city grass. Shit, I thought. Time to participate.
It had been a rough winter, rougher than most for me. For some unclear reason, it felt like someone hit the pause button on me, alone in bed, computer open scrolling the home page of Netflix where absolutely nothing was appealing. Of all the ways the apathy manifested during that period, this sent alarm bells reeling through my head. I love watching. Anything. From prestige TV to the sitcom I’ve seen every episode of approximately one thousand times. I’m fueled by it. It sparks ideas, creates conversation, bonds me with people who love burning their corneas to the same shows. Yet for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to hit play on anything. I’d just scroll and scroll through countless titles, eventually succumbing to staring at the blank wall, letting the back of my eyes come into view as I fell asleep.
Cut to that beautiful spring day. When it finally came around, I reconvened with friends and found myself anxious to speak. What did I have to contribute? Without material to jump off of, I couldn’t locate myself. All I could do was sit back and watch the familiar mannerisms of my dearest friends, listen to new stories of what they had been up to. One had just finished yoga teacher training, another had stories of the characters from the brewery she works at, invitations to a gallery opening were floated. Hearing this slowly coaxed me out of hibernation. The stories reminded me of all the places I wanted to go and filled me with new ideas to explore.
As it usually works with the universe, just as I was gearing up to be reacquainted with the world I got COVID. For the first time if you can believe it! It sent me back where I started staring at the ceiling in bed, but this time, intentional isolation made me see everything differently. All I could do was watch: the view out my window, the knick knacks on my bookshelf, the pile of tissues accumulating on my bedside table, and hours and hours of TV and movies to fill the time. Suddenly, I knew exactly what I wanted to watch. I realized part of what was plaguing my indecision before was anxiety around what was worth watching. But there were no standards anymore. Being sick is the time when guilty pleasures become mere pleasures.
One of those pleasures was the third season of Bridgerton, which had just dropped. I couldn’t ask for a more perfect pastel puff of intrigue to transport me from my misery. I devoured the measly four episodes in half a day. I knew Penelope’s storyline would speak to me more than past seasons and I was moved watching the wallflower demand the attention she deserves. In the first episode at a grand ball (where else?) while she’s finding her footing after a spectacular glow up, she urges another shy girl to get on the dance floor because “Once one finds oneself on the wall it is difficult to come off it.” Oof. Leave it to the show’s chief observer, the writer who knows her society better than they know themselves, to hit me right in my core.
Those words gave me the urge to act. To make something of all this watching. To take the leap of faith that is getting ideas out into the world. I’m a person with lots of ideas and little follow through, so I started by thinking back to all the crumbs of project ideas that I’d been sitting on. Case in point, I snagged this Substack, “Totally Tubeular,” almost two years ago. I originally planned to use the platform to explore the depths of YouTube culture (hence, “the tube”) because when I look back on some of the most significant watching experiences of my life, YouTube holds the key to a big chunk of my personality. I had a hunch that many people around my age might feel the same, and wanted to explore how the site played a role in fracturing monoculture and raising a new generation with increasingly niche interests. I still want to write about this, but the more I thought about coming back to this project, the more I wanted to cast a wider lens on the things we see that make us us.
So I’m expanding the “tubes” I want to explore. The original vacuum tubes of early television sets that propelled black and white scenes of Lucy’s antics into American households. The pure entertainment that gave those episodes staying power, threading them through public memory from generation to generation until the red-headed heroine captivated the tube of my mind on early aughts TV Land programming. The connection my parents made that if I loved this old show, I could definitely handle the musical theater classics they love. Which ignited a fascination that sent me at eighteen years old on a giant flying metal tube to New York City, where oversaturated electronic billboards, cheesy subway ads, and skyscrapers have defined my adulthood.
Lately, I’ve turned my attention to what other people are watching. If you just listen, people naturally share what they spend their hours fixated on. In just one weekend someone confessed to me that he watched the four-hour long video essay take-down of the DisneyWorld Star Wars Hotel. Someone else was present at the Timothee Chalamet look alike contest and described the proceedings in great detail. After a few Saturday night drinks it became clear that a dear friend keeps conjuring her crush, making movies in her mind of what would happen if she confessed her feelings.
That’s what I want to catalog in this newsletter. To start out, a lot of it will be my own musings on what I’ve seen lately. Movies, TV, the culture I encounter. But my goal is to go beyond myself, to pick the brains of friends, strangers, or anyone who will share with me. I want to glimpse through peoples’ minds to see the world in ways I never have before. I want to question what watching is anyway? Is it active or passive? Is it nourishing or draining? I want to do all of this with the larger goal to sharpen our vision into perspective.
So really, what are you watching?! I want to know.
Sights seen as this was written (roughly May-December, roughly in order):
Julia Jacklin’s solo show at National Sawdust, the first event I went to after recovering from COVID. Honestly, it was an awkward show because she made it clear that she was simply there to do her job. Tension was finally broken when the show ended with the entire crowd singing along to a YouTube karaoke track of her own song.
The faces of iHeartMedia management as the iHeartPodcast Union closed negotiations on our first contract in the Atlanta Dunkin’ Music Lounge.
About half of that 4 hour Star Wars hotel take-down.
Titanic, Suffs, Stereophonic, Oh, Mary!, Illinoise, Walden, Our Town, and Death Becomes Her all on (or just off) the ol’ Broad Way.
A dear friend get married at The Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse.
My father processing a new stage of life as he moved to various skilled nursing and assisted living facilities.
The Pacific Ocean from the safety of my car rolling up PCH, before the fires forever changed that particular view.
The sights and sounds of summer in New York, blurry as I whizz past them by bike.
I didn’t re-subscribe to Peacock for the Olympics. I re-subscribed to Peacock to re-watch Smash, then got hooked on the Olympics.
A group of youths and some adults dancing the night away at Connolly’s in the Rockaways. Their dynamics were so confusing that my friends and I have been discussing them ever since. Were they parents taking their daughter and her friends out? Actually maybe that’s a step-dad? Sex cult? All hypotheses are on the table.
The Atlantic Ocean from Rockaway Beach.
The Atlantic Ocean from the mirrored, Eastern view, at a wedding overlooking the Portuguese coast.
The one month old baby of a childhood friend. The first friend’s baby of my adult life. As one song of the summer put it, “She’s a radiant mother and he’s a beautiful father/And now they both know these things that I don’t.”
My mom recovering from surgery.
Orla Gartland, Laura Marling (twice), and Katie Gavin in an incredible trifecta of shows at Bowery Ballroom.
Wicked!!!!!!!
My own Instagram stories of Thanksgivings past (all saved in highlights on my cooking account, @ezbake-emily) to prepare for 2024’s Misfits Thanksgiving.
My first ever hockey game. Go Sirens!
The meeting of my favorite dog and cat, which was more like a standoff.
Old acquaintances not forgot celebrating through a legendary string of birthday, holiday, and New Years parties last December.
Afternote: As mentioned, I wrote this essay throughout the majority of 2024. In the first weeks of 2025 there have been many things worth watching, in more of a necessary sense than a positive one. My hometown, LA, has lost acres and acres to the fires and I’ll add to the chorus of people suggesting you donate however you can. I’m contributing to GoFundMes of Black families displaced by the Eton Fire in Altadena and Pasadena.
It’s also worth noting that I was finalizing this post on the eve of the TikTok ban and even had a little blurb prepared about how fitting it feels to commit to a longform project when the source of my short attention span is suddenly gone. But now…it’s back? I can confidently say the last 48 hours have been the most thrilling moments social media has ever provided me.
And on that note, inauguration is tomorrow. I don’t know if I’ll be watching but I will definitely be paying attention.