The Vine: May 26, 2010
Dear Sars,
I was out for dinner with my SO and wanted to fill him in on the finale of a reality TV show. I’d started to do that when the woman at the next table leaned over and asked me if I would not talk about it because she hadn’t seen it yet. She had it Tivo’d, she explained, she just hadn’t gotten around to viewing it. This was a Saturday night. The show had aired on Thursday night.
I said sure. But in the gargantuan silence that developed as my SO and I tried to leapfrog to another topic of conversation, I started to wonder: Was she rude to ask? Would I have been rude to continue? Is there a minimum number of days before spoilers aren’t spoilers anymore?
Sincerely,
It was the guy from Vancouver, WA!
Dear Tim Gunn,
What a timely question, with all the season/series finales airing this time of year…and also because I’ve been sitting on a related rant for several days. Okay, so.
It’s a two-part question: whether it’s okay to ask people around you to refrain from speech that you don’t want to hear for whatever reason, and whether it’s okay to expect other people to protect you from spoilers.
As to the first part, I think she’s within her rights to ask, and although she should not expect you to comply, I think it’s polite for you to change the subject once she’s expressed discomfort with hearing the results. I’ll get to the spoiler-specific part in a moment, but let’s subtract that from the equation for now — what if she’d asked you to refrain from using colorful language because she had small children with her? You wouldn’t “have to” stop, I guess, and it’s not realistic for parents to think their kids will never hear curse words, but unless you’d convened the dinner specifically to discuss the etymology of the word “horseshit”…you see what I mean. It’s a slight hassle, but a lot of polite behavior is a slight hassle. You just have to focus on the “slight” part.
As to spoilers themselves, I can’t really say it better than Mary Elizabeth Williams did for Salon last week:
It’s a reasonable courtesy not to blab the outcome of last night’s “American Idol” if it’s Thursday morning and a busy co-worker says she’s DVR’d it for later. If it’s the summer of 2007, don’t broadcast all the stuff that goes down in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” to your friends who are slower readers.
But for the love of God, if you really don’t want to know about a book/movie/television show, do the rest of the world a favor and stop hanging out in the online discussion groups about it. Sure, if you live in a time zone where your favorite show has not yet aired, you could go on any of the many websites devoted to it and rage about the injustice of it all, like the poster in a “24” thread who complained, “Your East Coast arrogance that once it airs on the East Coast, it’s fair game to blog about — and ruin for us on the West Coast — is beyond stunning.” Or you maybe could restrain yourself from joining the discussion for three measly hours.
I don’t care about spoilers. I don’t seek them out; nor do they ruin my day. I ran a TV site for close to a decade, and they came with the job, to an extent, but some of my colleagues did care and avoided spoilers assiduously. I just don’t care to make that much effort. On the rare occasions when I’d really rather not know in advance, I take care to 1) watch the episode when it airs, or at least within 12 hours, and 2) avoid places on the internet where the plot twist or result is likely to pop up.
The bitching on social media about other users of social media spoiling TV shows is beyond tiresome; I don’t go out of my way to ruin surprises, by any means, but if you know people spoil shows on Twitter, you…have to stay off Twitter until you’ve watched the damn thing. You have to avoid sites devoted to arts-and-entertainment coverage. “But I wanted to read this OTHER thing, and the headline on the homepage sp–” Stop it. Please. If it’s that difficult for you to live three hours behind the first airing, move out here: problem solved. “But that’s ridiculous!” Yes. Yes, it is. Because it’s just a TV show. The angel Gabriel has not descended from above to reveal to you the date of your own death. (I…assume.)
Williams also points out, and I agree, that if the work in question relies that heavily on the element of surprise, it may not be worth your time in the first place: “[A] work is more than its outcome. Suspense is a lovely element, but it’s not the whole megillah; if it were, nobody would ever watch a Hitchcock film twice.”
Again, I don’t purposefully spoil results, and prior to airing or release is a different story entirely; I saw a movie last night that doesn’t come out ’til Friday, and you haven’t had the same opportunity, so it’s uncool for me to reveal key twists without warning. But often it is in fact my job to provide timely coverage of film and television, and if your consumption is less timely, and I have not appeared in your line of vision wearing a “SETH AARON” t-shirt and a bitchy smirk, then you need to get over it. Facebook and the IMDb will spoil you — if you haven’t watched yet, you go to those sites at your own risk. I take reasonable care around here to hide spoilish discussion after a jump, and you can ask me in conversation not to spoil you on certain things; I’ll certainly take it under advisement. But if you care that much, you watch it right away, you stay off the internet until you can, or you…stop caring that much and just enjoy the experience of the show or movie.
The internet means we can get information right away; that has a downside. Live with it.
Tags: Alfred Hitchcock American Idol etiquette Tim Gunn TV
Preach.
/totally wants to know what’s up with Aiden
//but will wait until Friday
///or read The Movie Spoiler on Saturday
This was actually something that happened to me several years ago. My boyfriend at the time and I were out to dinner before going to see one of the Bourne movies (probably the first one, now that I think about it.) It was either the first or second weekend it was out. He noticed that the people in the booth behind us were talking about the movie (having seen it at the first showing whereas we were going to the second) and turned to ask them if they could not discuss the ending, and they went along. Was that a Kosher request, considering we WERE seeing it in a fairly timely manner, just not instantaneously? (FWIW, I don’t have a lot of skin in THIS game, since a) I hadn’t even noticed the other couple’s conversation and b) I probably wouldn’t have cared if I had–I’m sure the movie was ex-BF’s choice, but I loathed all those a-holes who went around screaming “____ kills ____ at the end of Harry Potter 6!” the day after the book came out.)
THANK YOU Sars. This is basically my policy with these things. I feel like, especially with finales, asking the entire internet not to spoil you is like saying “Don’t tell me who won the Superbowl, I have it TiVo’d.” There is a certain celeb from a Thursday night comedy who tweets about the shows she likes and chastises East Coasters for spoiling West Coast viewers. It recently resulted in someone tweeting the plot of a finale she hadn’t yet seen directly to her, which is horribly mean and not an appropriate response, but maybe wouldn’t have happened if she had shut her trap and stayed off Twitter from 5-8 PST. I hope to hell this type of thinking gets adopted as National Spoiler Avoidance Policy.
What you said is so true – I’m about 2 seasons behind on lost, and it’s almost impossible to not find out what the finale was about, but I haven’t, yet. I also realize that at some point, someone WILL spoil it for me, so I’ve just accepted that. Will I be disappointed when it happens? Sure, for about 3 minutes, then my real life will continue as before.
Wait, what about the part where this woman was at ANOTHER TABLE and so therefore was eavesdropping? If she’d been part of the group at the table, I’d be OK with her making the request … but from a person who’s not part of your group and is sitting at a different table? That seems kind of rude and also inappropriate to me.
I wasn’t able to watch the Survivor finale when it aired, and I don’t have a DVR, so I had to wait until I could watch it on Hulu. Of course I got spoiled on Facebook, but instead of complaining I accepted that it was my own fault for not realizing I should’ve avoided FB until I’d seen the show.
Same situation with Lost (why do all these finales have to air on church night?), but at least this time when I noticed some westies live-tweeting it, I got the heck off of Twitter and pretty much avoided all the parts of the Internet that weren’t directly work-related until after I’d watched it the next morning. Problem solved.
This also reminded me of the time I got reamed out for inadvertently spoiling someone in the UK on the ending of Buffy. Which, I felt really bad about it, but at the same time, maybe if you’re in another country and a fan of a US-based show, you should avoid US-based sites about that show, especially the day after you knew (this poster did know) that said show ended for good in the US. I mean, I’m not going to go read UK-based Doctor Who sites and complain about spoilers for episodes that haven’t aired here yet.
That article on the spoil police has really been making the rounds!
There is a need for good tv-enthusiast etiquette on both sides. I think that the ease of time-shifting tv events does complicate it a little bit. I can’t watch Survivor the night it airs, and usually can’t catch up on it in the next 24 hours. I do my best to avoid online discussion of it until I can view it. I actively avoid going to, say “Reality TV World”, where I know the booted contestant will be revealed on headlines. Luckily, general news outlets like CNN have learned to craft headlines that do not spoil results. I sometimes forget, though, and navigate to sites that cover entertainment more generally, which usually are good about not having spoiler IN the headlines or right on home pages, but sometimes, not so much, and it is kind of a bummer. My favorite part of watching shows like that is doing a running commentary with friends, and that is less fun when the outcome is known.
Again, though, it is MY responsibility to avoid that material, which means my visits to such sites goes down a lot when they are known to include results on their home pages.
I actually run into this with the Olympics more often than with TV shows and movies, so I just change my homepage from Google News to just regular old Google so that I don’t find out who won the men’s downhill or whatever until I watch it since NBC refuses to run real time coverage even when I’m in the same damned timezone as the Games. /endrant.
That said, I also stayed up until midnight on Sunday to watch “Lost” so that I could turn on a computer/look at my phone on Monday morning. I just figured that it was going to be all over the place, and if I wanted to avoid it, I was going to have to stay in my house with the shades drawn until I watched it.
Excuse me, but could you just stop talking?
Here in Canada, shows often air several weeks/months after they begin in the US thus one must WORK to avoid being spoiled. The only thing that bothers me is if I’m reading a blog about one show (say, Survivor – which airs simultaneously) and someone makes reference to the new winner of another show (for example, Project Runway – which does NOT air simultaneously). Even though I’ve tried to actively avoid spoilers, they pop up in unexpected places. But the disappointment is fleeting because seriously: television.
I think it was nice of Tim to stop the conversation and not at all rude for the other person in the restaurant to ask you to stop.
Thanks, Sarah.
A message board experience I had at the end of Everwood’s second season, where a spoiler was leaked, heavily discounted by a wrong/misinformed/nefarious “insider,” and then turned out to be correct, finished the show for me. I was so put off by the plot turn that I didn’t even bother to watch it when it aired to see how it was handled — a disservice to myself as an until-then loyal viewer.
I now only read spoilers for shows I don’t watch, so I’m caught up should I be asked in conversation about them. I avoid spoilers for shows I do watch because I want to continue enjoying them as they’re presented and not jump ahead and make snap decisions about plot leaks that may or may not be bullshit.
As for verbally overhearing spoilers in public — it’s just going to happen. Watch the show and then go out, if you’re going to be crushed by a passerby’s loose lips.
A guy I worked for several years ago loved retelling the tale of standing in an outside line on the first day for Empire Strikes Back and having a car peel by and the occupants shout out the identity of Darth Vader to everyone in the line.
Aaargh. There are people on the AV Club who complain that people are spoiling “Buffy” and “Angel” for them – in articles titled thing like “16 Shocking TV Deaths,” or “21 Plot Twists We Never Saw Coming.”
I mean, come ON.
@Sarah: I think it’s fine to ASK, and on opening weekend, it’s fair to expect that most people won’t have seen it yet. Second weekend…enh. The Bournes are kinda hard to spoil anyway.
@mrs f: That hadn’t occurred to me…but there are many (you might even say it’s most of the) restaurants in NYC where your conversation is not your own, like it or not; the tables are kee-RAMMED together, and you really can’t “help but overhear.”
And in case you didn’t catch BSD’s reference, it’s here: https://tomatonation.com/vine/the-vine-april-23-2001/
I think there’s a difference though, between avoiding “spoilers” on the internet and avoiding “spoilers” in real life. If I haven’t watched a show yet, I can certainly avoid going on certain internet sites that are likely to discuss the show. That is fully within my control. But what if I’m in an elevator & people are talking about last night’s show? That’s not really within my power to avoid. I’m not saying you’re entitled to have other people stop talking about it, but I will say that last night I was at dinner with my mom and we were discussing the Lost finale at a restuarant. We were seated pretty close to another table and I actually wondered if I’d be spoiling things for them if they hadn’t seen it yet.
Another similar situation – I was on a plane the day after the last Harry Potter book came out. I was reading it on the plane, and there was a mother reading the same book out loud to her son in the seat behind me. They were ahead of me in the book, so I wanted to put my fingers in my ears and yell “LA LA LA CAN’T HEAR YOU” but I settled for popping my ipod earbuds in and trying not to listen to her. (sometimes it’s hard though, like the more I tried NOT to listen, the more I could actually hear her).
IT’S A COOKBOOK!
I’m going to chime in as a westcoaster. Just as it’s not that big a deal to tell us to stay off the internet for three hours it’s also not that big a deal for people to try to refrain from posting spoiler stuff outside of TV/entertainment related sites for three hours. I’m still at work when you guys are watching Survivor (for example) and it’s not exactly easy for me to stay offline. Many times I’ve gone to check twitter or facebook or whatever before I leave the office and seen spoilers. I agree that people have the right to do whatever they want and the internet is the internet, I’m just saying you can be a little more obtuse maybe rather than WAY TO GO SANDRA! WOOOO!! And I lived out east so I’m not some kind of eastern hater. I’m just saying we’re allowed to be annoyed and ask nicely for a little consideration.
But I totally agree that those morons that go onto a 24 website after it starts to air anywhere do so at their peril. Jesus Christ people!
And I live in Canada to boot, where we don’t have Hulu and Project Runway is broadcast two weeks behind the US (grr) so I totally understand sometimes you get spoiled and you have to move on with your life. It *is* just a TV show.
At least out here the Oscars are over by 8:30, heh.
This came up on twitter recently during the NHL playoffs. A number of people that I follow, and follow me back, are fans of a particular team. During a game we (naturally) were chatting about it. Such is the nature of a real-time and rapid communication channel as Twitter.
One person fell into this huge rant that she was at her kid’s event and taping the game, and hated us all for ruining it for her. While she was at her kid’s game. Following twitter. Live. From her iphone. She expected the rest of the world to shut up about a live event because she couldn’t go an hour without checking Twitter?
No sympathy. If you don’t want spoilers, stay off of the web. Don’t expect everyone else to accommodate your schedule. Likewise, since I live on the West Coast, I keep my nose out of things when I’m waiting for the season finale of a show to air in my time zone. I *know* the east coast has already seen it, and I don’t expect the internet to be in some kind of lockdown because the West Coast has yet to see it air.
Yeah, the problem for me with the restaurant example is that there’s a pretty powerful etiquette rule that you pretend you can’t hear what people at other tables are saying. There are lots of conversations other people have that I don’t care to be privy to, but honestly, you have an almost sacred duty to avoid intruding on other people’s conversations in that kind of setting, as far as I’m concerned, unless someone needs help or is in danger or something. I understand the concern, and if you aren’t annoyed, I certainly wouldn’t tell you to be. But telling other people that they can’t talk about something because you don’t want to hear that content of their discussion really rubs me the wrong way.
Of course, I am like Sarah — I’ve long ago stopped really caring whether things are spoiled, because I’ve had so many things spoiled, and when I really care about being surprised, I simply watch things when they’re on.
Excuse me, but could you just stop talking?
My nephew said this to me once. He was three at the time, so instead of coming across as extremely obnoxious (as it would if my teenage nephews said it), it was just very funny.
Oh, topic? As someone who plans to one day, maybe, start watching LOST, I have made my peace with the fact that I heard at least six Lostie friends talking on Monday morning about the finale. If I wanted to be surprised by the ending, I should have started watching sooner. But if I were a serious Lostie, and I had DVR’d the show on Sunday night to watch on Monday, I think I’d have expected my friends to take their post-game analysis elsewhere if I asked nicely. By today, though, it would be fair game.
I think your answer to the original questions is spot on–not rude to politely ask, nice of him to comply. It’s a we-live-in-a-society-not-a-bubble kind of situation…sure, it’s a little annoying to have to reroute your conversation halfway through, but you’re in a public place and you’d appreciate the same courtesy if the tables were turned, so…again, not required but the nice thing to do.
I am perpetually a season behind on everything since we watch all of our TV on Netflix, and I accept that spoiler-avoidance is ENTIRELY on me. That said, if I am actually in conversation with someone who brings up a show I’m behind on, I do ask them nicely to please not spoil it if they don’t mind…but if I run across stuff in the course of random internetting, I just try to forget it, or else focus on all the other stuff that I like about the show and not let that knowing that one aspect derail me. I mean, I’m watching the first season of True Blood right now and already read the book–still enjoying it!
It’s really not that hard. I even made it through the series finale of The Wire and the big temple scene scandal on Big Love having to, like, jump to turn off NPR when my car radio came on in mid-sentence-spoiler several times without really getting “spoiled”.
I guess it’s a little different on contest-type shows where the outcome is a huge part of the point of watching, but I don’t follow any of those anymore anyway. They don’t really lend themselves to Netflix-style viewing.
I’m of a split mind about this. On one hand, of course I don’t want to be spoiled about a big season/series ending event–especially if I’ve made the effort to watch in a timely manner and felt like part of a big family of viewers.
On another hand, when I do watch a big event, I want to talk about it! And if said big event was a letdown or ridiculous due to plot holes, bad writing, or whatever,I want to RANT about it, early and often. I have the terrible habit of blurting out “but how on God’s green earth did Jason Bourne know X when Agent Z hadn’t handed of the microfilm to Team Delta yet?!” on the way out of the theater. Not loudly or anything, my brain just still chewing over the plot, but I can see inadvertently ruining a movie someone just paid thirteen bucks plus parking and popcorn is rude and not a good idea, so I just streak past the theater crowd as soon as possible. Once I’m out of hearing range of the line waiting to get in, I think talking about a movie using inside voice is perfectly kosher, as long I’m not ruining it for members of the conversation. You’re out in public, you run risks. If I’m strolling through a bookstore and some person is talking to their freinds about Lost or whatever, well, I’ll just keep moving, and if I overhear a spoiler, life is hard and somehow I’ll get over it.
When you’re in a situation where you’re semi-trapped into listening, like a restaurant, I dunno. Maybe the best solution is to plug your ears and have a dining companion signal when the spoiler is past? But if they keep talking…it’s a tough call. If someone politely asked me not to spoil, however, I would comply.
Heidi, was your cousin really there? I’ve heard that story countless times over the years until I assumed it was an urban legend! Talk about a tremendouche.
I sort of disagree about your point on headlines on the front page of entertainment sites; at least, I don’t entirely agree.
I concede that such sites have no obligation to go out of their way to avoid any and all spoilers. It’s impossible to write a blurb summarizing an episode of any show that doesn’t contain, well, some information about that episode. To me, it does however make a difference if you write something like “A close finish for Generic Reality Show, with a surprising twist and a winner that many will find controversial – click through to see why!†or simply “John wins Generic Reality Show!â€
Again, they have no obligation to go out of their way to avoid any and all spoilers, but I feel they shouldn’t go out of their way just to make sure to punch you in the nose with a spoiler, either.
A standard argument about Free Speech is that nobody has a right to not be offended. True, but going around intentionally offending people is still rude.
But they’re not “intentionally offending” people; they’re reporting news, which in the case of a site like E! is exactly their function. As an editor, you don’t have time to piss people off on purpose; you’re too busy getting the best, fastest editorial you can, and getting it read by the most people. The idea is to get people to click on it.
If it’s on CNN, it’s not really necessary, because that isn’t CNN’s mandate, but to complain about headlines on an entertainment site? “That thing with the guy…happened” is not good editorial, come on.
Honestly, I’m the type of person who sometimes reads the last page of a book first, so you can probably already see where I stand on spoilers. I’m in strong agreement with the idea that if knowing certain plot points ruins the experience, it’s probably not that good of a story to begin with. With most genre fiction (and I include Harry Potter in this category), you know that JK Rowling has not written a world in which Voldemort could finally win by the second or third book. That was never in doubt for me. And while I certainly don’t hold with the type of person who tells people the ending on purpose, I’m definitely in the experience it or get over it camp.
The most irritating thing about the release of the 7th Harry Potter book for me was the myth that JK Rowling and the publishers were spouting that there’s some sort of magical reading experience that everyone would have together immediately after it was released at midnight and that if anyone knew the ending in advance this magic would be spoiled. Give me a break.
For me, politeness is the be-all, end-all of spoiler discussions. Gently cutting off a friend with an “Eek, I’m watching the TiVo of that tonight, can we pick this up again tomorrow?” is fine. Treating someone like they’re either a socially-inept dweeb or deliberately trying to ruin your entire life when they mention the ending to “28 Days Later”? Not cool. We’re all capable of not talking about a subject if we’ve been asked nicely. But we ALSO must accept that not everyone goes around with an encyclopedic knowledge of what everybody else has/has not watched.
(If the “28 Days Later” comment seems pretty specific, it is. I got into a discussion with three friends at a bar about the movie, and after about ten minutes I said something about the ending. To which one “friend” snapped, “Well thanks a lot for ruining the movie for me.” I..the what now? The fact that you haven’t seen the movie yet is something you mention when the subject is brought up, dimbulb, how about a little advance notice next time? Fume.)
Furthermore, please understand that if you’re writing a story for online, you need it to be Google-friendly and otherwise findable, and if you make the title “Someone won a show last night; click here to see more!” then nobody will find it.
This may sound brutal, but asking news organizations to post headlines without any of the important words in them actually is a bigger imposition than you might think.
P.S. Of course, with that said, I was the person who went out of the way to remind my own news organization that the ending of Lost should not be described on the homepage in specific terms until at least the end of the West-coast airing. So we do try.
@Kim: HEE!
Whenever I’m dangerously close to providing a spoiler for a book, movie or television show, I usually use one of two ways to get out of trouble. One of them is “It’s a cookbook!”
I used the other yesterday with someone who asked me to tell her what happened on the finale of Lost WITHOUT telling her what happened on the finale of Lost. Hmmm…so I told her that in the last 5 minutes of the show, Suzanne Pleshette sat up in bed, leaned over, and shook Terry O’Quinn awake to tell him that she’d had this terrible dream…
Battling Tremendouches:
“Excuse me, I haven’t seen that show yet. Could you keep your voices low? I really like it and don’t want it spoiled.”
“No, fuck you, mind your own goddamn business.”
“…okay.” (lights up a cigarette)
“Hey asshole, could you put out that disgusting shit, we’re trying to fucking EAT here.”
“No, fuck you, mind your own goddamn business.”
Sometimes it’s better to be spoiled. I was spoiled for Xander’s eye, and thank God; it was still really horrible, but weirdly, if I hadn’t known it was coming, it would have felt more gratuitous. That may have been a function of the dog’s-breakfast-y writing that season, but still.
For a “site like E!â€, I’m entirely with you. I guess for me it depends on the expectations a site has instilled in its readers. If any spoilerphobe with half a brain knows not to visit my site if there’s something they haven’t seen yet, there’s no need to hold back. If I have reason to assume that someone who is taking reasonable precautions against spoilers might still visit my site, well, maybe don’t put the winner right in the headline.
Which you pretty much said yourself, you “take reasonable care around here to hide spoilish discussion after a jump.â€
Maybe I disagree less than I thought.
@Kim.
Also, did you hear about Soylent Green?
This reminds me of a discussion I saw recently (can’t remember the context), where the poster was comparing something with Anna Karenina and some commenters jumped all over her for ‘spoiling the ending’. Of Anna Karenina.
I have to admit that occasionally with a reality show, I’ve been thankful to be accidently spoiled. It probably means I’m spared watching two hours of what’s mostly filler.
@Maik: I almost feel the same way, but I also understand Sarah’s point of view as an editor. I definitely appreciate sites that make it a policy to not put spoilers right out front. But I understand also that headlines and home pages are meant to provide the most information that will get me to read more. In exchange for the views and clicks they get for putting out that information, those sites will lose mine, as I actively avoid them. I think that is fair.
I am in total agreement that it is up to the individual viewer to stay away from places where spoilers are to be expected – ie entertainment websites, show discussion boards etc. However, I cannot stand people who take pleasure in spoiling shows for people. I like the Bachelorette/Bachelor franchise. I like to play the guessing game of who is going to get the final rose. I am not fanatic about it, but it’s enjoyable. What’s not enjoyable is reading a recap of the first episode and it’s comments and having someone report the ending four or five different times throughout the discussion. That’s unnecessary and rude. And just mean spirited. I don’t really understand the thought process of people who go out of their way to ruin the surprise. I
Living outside of the US, but wanting to follow US pop culture/sites generally, spoilers are a way of life. Shows like The West Wing were always at least half a season ahead of us in Australia, and other shows might begin airing entirely after their run has ceased in the US. It didn’t particularly bother me with shows like TWW- I’m not watching for a particular outcome so much as the characters, etc. And if I wanted to avoid spoilers I’d avoid the forums on TWoP & just try to read recaps week by week (scrolling down past more recent recap summaries quickly with one eye closed etc). That said, it’s really hard to remain unspoiled altogether, and it can be annoying for other shows like Survivor, where knowing the winner several episodes in advance can really affect your enjoyment of the game. This isn’t to say I expect anyone to do anything differently, necessarily, obviously it’s impossible to cater for different markets. But it was annoying to log on to Salon to check out Cary Tennis, and to see the headline story with the photograph of the winner. I guess my point is not so much that anything could be changed, just that from a certain point of view it’s impossible to avoid- you’re frequently spoiled by indirect methods, rather than going to the Survivor gossip site, or whatever.
It was the sled!
Living in Australia where things can get delayed for years and writing about TV for a living means I’m pretty immune to experiencing spoiler rage, but I remember that during the first season of Survivor there was a day’s delay between the finale airing in the US and here and a lot of newspapers, including my own published that _ spoiler alert _ Richard Hatch won before it aired.
Some were more conscious of how they said it than others (not my paper from memory, we probably assumed our readers were above watching reality TV) and I had an argument with the person who ran it. They said it was news. I argued that “man wins overseas game show” was not particularly BIG news, which is what Survivor was unless you watched, so the only people who cared were the people who would probably quite like to find out for themselves that night by watching.
I am not a television watcher, but hearing everyone talk about Lost for the last however many years has made me a bit curious, in an almost trainwrecky sort of way. So, ever since the finale, I’ve been actively seeking out “Lost Final Episode: Spoilers!” links in the hopes of getting a rundown. All I get are things like, “The way they ended things with Joe and Mary – wow! And the way Frank looked at Oscar in that one scene, man, I cried.”
My son and I went to see “Book of Eli” when it came out, at his request; we were ~20 minutes into the movie and I leaned over and whispered “What on earth is he doing?” and my son whispered back, “[ENORMOUS SPOILER].” I didn’t believe him until much later in the movie, and on the way out I asked how he’d picked up on that so quickly. He gave me an odd look, like it was a really stupid question, and said, “I went to IMDb and read all the message threads to decide whether or not I wanted to see it.”
Spoilers’re in the eye of the beholder, I guess…
Karen: Which celeb?
and
Diane: Is checking Facebook and Twitter part of your job? I understand having to go on line for work, but checking Facebook and Twitter really seems like an optional activity…
SCTV spoiled Jane Eyre for me. True story.
There was an AV Club discussion of a Random Roles headline: “___ talks about killing Laura Palmer, and …” On the one hand, a hard-to-avoid spoiler; on the other, it was only fair that they expect that the audience for that interview would be familiar with Twin Peaks, a full two decades after the killer was revealed.
By the way, I spoiled myself (as it were) by reading the Wikipedia description of the movie “Dear Zachary” — I think Sars reviewed it a while ago — on the grounds that I am probably never going to be able to bear to actually watch that movie. I can now say that just reading the Wikipedia description is painful.
I guess my definition of spoiler is a bit different than everyone else’s.
I don’t think that talking about the ending of a show 2 DAYS after it aired is “spoiling” anything.
I knew 2 months ago that Sandra had won Survivor, as I read it on a site I go to (hoping that it wasn’t Russell). If I had talked about that in a public place prior to Thursday night, that would have been spoiling it, and would have been rude and inconsiderate.
But Saturday? Two days later? Not spoiling, IMO. Exactly how many days does one have to give the general public to watch their recorded shows? I think it was ridiculous of the person at the neighbouring table to ask.
I totally yelled at a guy in line at the bank the day after Lost. Luckily so did a couple of others. We all laughed and it was fine and he was happy to reveal nothing.
I am watching the finale tonight – and have successfully stayed in the dark. No mean feat since I have to be on FB/Twitter and a million news sites for my job.
However, I DID open up that “fifteen shocking deaths” on EW that someone mentioned above – not thinking about it at all – and got spoiled on The Wire. Ha. That made me laugh – it never occured to me that it would be there. Bummer.
Just for another take on the international television issue: I was watching a certain Brazilian telenovela (shut up) that Telemundo is currently airing (originally aired about a year and a half ago), and I was really enjoying it. I had been to the wikipedia page when I was first deciding whether it was worth watching, and last week I went back there to see if that one actor had been in that one other show and someone had put a GIANT SPOILER ABOUT THE IDENTITY OF THE VILLAIN RIGHT IN THE INTRO. I mean, I realize that it has already been done and aired for over a year now, but to put “You don’t find out that person X is the villain until episode 50” on the ENGLISH LANGUAGE wikipedia when the US airing is only up to episode 30 at most? That was just gratuitous tremendoucheness (tremendouchosity? tremendouchiality?). Even the Portuguese version had spoiler warnings, waaaaay down in the Plot section where it belongs… and it’s not like I can easily bittorrent it, either! To have watched it in a timely manner I would have had to either A) hunt down either an English- or Spanish-language version of the first FIFTY episodes, or B) learn Portuguese, and then hunt down the first 50 original-language episodes, and watch them faster than the 10 hr/wk rate Telemundo’s showing them at.
I suppose it’s my own fault for going on wikipedia and assuming within that two week period no one would have added giant spoilers for no reason in the first paragraph… but mostly I’m pissed that the wrong character turned out to be evil. Now I don’t even want to watch anymore! The one who will turn out to be good is hella annoying!
I think one finale that was much more intense because I’d somehow (mostly inadvertently) managed to avoid spoilers was The Office. Really glad about that one. But as a whole the shows for which spoilers *really* matter for me are few and far between. For really good shows, IMO, there’s been enough foundation established ahead of time that seeing *how* something plays out is much more interesting than “omg did you see?? what a twist!” just for the hell of it (I’m looking at you, Russell Davies. Ugh). But I digress.
I write for a reality TV website and we go out of our way not to spoil anything in a recap teaser on the homepage or in tweets. Why would people read our recaps if we spoiled the ending for them?
But if you haven’t watched a show and you go to a site where you know there’s going to be an article or discussion about the show, caveat lector. Life doesn’t have spoiler alerts.
By the way, for as long as I live, I will NEVER be over Xander’s eye.
I agree that the burden of avoidance is on the person who hasn’t watched the show yet. Don’t go on Facebook. Don’t go to EW.com. Don’t go to the TWoP forums. But a person at the next table in a restaurant–or standing ahead of you in line at the grocery store–now, that’s another thing. I would politely ask them to refrain from talking about that particular subject while I’m nearby, though the only reason they have to comply is goodwill towards fellow citizens of the earth.
Although, in the restaurant situation, it occurs to me that if the finale-talkers were really put out by the request, the lady at the next table could have said, “I’m going to step out and make a phone call [or whatever] for a few minutes,” and given them some time to wrap it up instead of asking them to leave things hanging.
My philosophy is that if you want to remain spoiler-free after something airs, it is YOUR responsibility to build the force-field around yourself (and you want to oversdesign the size of the force-field based on how much you actually care if it doesn’t work) and the longer you expect it to hold, the larger it needs to get to block out outside information filtering in. Once 12-24 hours have passed, if you’re avoiding something majorly culturally relevant, you probably need to be living in a bubble to avoid finding out (or at least total electronic blackout + wearing a nifty “don’t spoil me” t-shirt). In a world of twitter, you can reduce that to about 2 minutes. On the other hand, if you’re avoiding something that only you care about (hey, who won the Vancouver hockey game?), it’s a trade-off between being accidentally spoiled (even PTI has a bottom-line of scores) and being paranoid & underconsuming other media.
Then again, my level of cultural awareness far surpasses my actual amount of media consumption, so my knowledge-base is probably one big spoiler anyway, and I can blame the Simpsons for a solid 50% of that!
It was all my fault and now Sarah hates me.
A few weeks ago, I was at work, catching up on my twitter feed as I am wont to do in spare moments, and Sarah RT’ed a spoiler for The Biggest Loser, which wasn’t to start airing on the west coast for another hour. I replied, “Spoiler?” Sarah read me the riot act for being on twitter when there were spoilers to be seen. I think she may have insulted my parentage at the time too, not sure, it’s a haze of pain.
I was torn. One the one hand, it wasn’t as if I was cruising entertainment sites or anything. On the other hand, I _was_ using a social media site (or rather Tweetie, which aggregates twitter for me). I’d just really never had anything spoiled on twitter for me quite yet, so I hadn’t really expected it to start and was surprised when it happened.
In general, I figure if I’m DVR’ing something, then I can expect spoilers. If I’m watching something on DVD when it comes out (say, Dexter) then I can expect the season ending of a season I won’t be buying for another few months to be spoiled, and I’m just fine with that. Haven’t seen Avatar yet, please spoil away.
So, I basically responded that I was a webmaster, worked on the web, so avoiding the internet was difficult, but that twitter access was admittedly my fault. I’ve always admired Sarah over the years, so the exchange was troubling (you try seemingly angering someone you’ve admired, see how you like it).
I’ve seen her tweet a couple different posts or threads about spoilers since then. Each time I saw one, I thought, uh-oh, this is because of that thing I tweeted. In the first one, it was someone with an entertainment site saying (amongst other things) that they purposely didn’t tweet spoilery stuff until after it had aired west coast (and they went so far as to wait until the next morning) which I thought was very considerate of them. The second was the quoted article above. I don’t really count twitter as a discussion board for a tv show per se, but as it’s become so many things to so many people, I suppose it must be lumped in with that now.
Obviously, I, like Diane, would appreciate if the spoilers didn’t start until after west coast airings (god, Hawaii must hate us all). But, like with Diane, it’s a question of accessing social media sites (well, and the reality of the situation). Facebook is easy enough for me to avoid, but twitter is such a part of my communication network with friends (eclipsing email in many ways with the vast majority of them) and so ubiquitous (app is always running, phone is always in pocket), that that’s the hard one to think to switch off at 5 PM on the night of any contest-type show I care about (and then not back on until 10PM or so). Sunday, I just left the laptop in the bag while watching Lost and for the 3 hours before.
The real question is: how can I get Sarah to smile at me? Do I need to send kitten-themed clothing? Do I need to send anything _but_ kitten-themed clothing?
– – Rob
OK, clearly Sars has never lived on the West Coast. :) I’m just saying, if you watch TV shows, that means that on certain nights, you aren’t supposed to read pretty much any internet between 5pm (when the prime time shows start airing on East Coast) and 11pm (when they end). If I watch two shows of an evening (say, Glee at 8PM and Good Wife at 10PM that doesn’t end until 11 and might have some end-of-the-show-twist), I can’t check Facebook or any news sites or anything from the end of the work day until the shows stop ending, because someone on the east coast might have posted? I mean, sure, I’m not saying spoilers will kill me dead, but it’s really nice when people are considerate and post something more like “OMG GLEE!” or “KURT’S DAD” rather than the specifics
This past week I was a little frustrated that people were essentially live-blogging the Grey’s Anatomy finale on Facebook, but I just sucked it up and avoided FB for the day until I could watch the show. I do wish people would say their impressions without saying specific facts (I always do), but that’s their prerogative.
I may not be the best judge since I’m still mad at my mom for spoiling the ending of Braveheart…
@Rob: I’m pretty sure all I said was, “…Really, dude?” but in any case, it isn’t you. And please do not send kitten-themed clothing. Heh.
@meara: You can check Facebook and news sites; you just can’t feel entitled to spoiler protection if you do so, or get really het up that people on the east coast DO want to go on those sites and discuss what they’ve just seen.
Between not having access to the DVR, being a time zone behind most of the time, and spending more time on the internet than I did watching TV, my road trip meant I got spoiled about 16 times while I was on the road. Boston Rob’s ouster: spoiled. Two weeks of Project Runway: spoiled. (Challenge: spoiled DURING THE SHOW by the fucknuts MTV promo department, which gives away the ending of the current episode by promoing the next one…but it’s the Challenge, so who cares.) But…it’s a road trip. That’s going to happen. You’re going to miss some TV, you’re going to have to watch it with commercials and not be able to pause it, and you’re going to get spoiled. I’m not going to stay home; also, I don’t care.
It’s a choice. Which is more important, unspoilage or the ability to use the internet? Choose, and act accordingly.
@Linda: “Yeah, the problem for me with the restaurant example is that there’s a pretty powerful etiquette rule that you pretend you can’t hear what people at other tables are saying. There are lots of conversations other people have that I don’t care to be privy to..”
Amen to that. Who knows, maybe the couple at the next table is in the middle of nasty divorce, and the only thing that they can amicably talk about is tv show xx. The internet is one thing, but in real life you have to figure out to ignore stuff you don’t like and don’t want to hear. I’ll ignore your anti-immigrant bumpersticker, if you let me talk about a gay relationship at the McDonalds.
I just decided to live under a socio-cultural rock and not watch TV at all (don’t even own one) and don’t use Facebook or Twitter either.
OK, I’m going back now… it’s much too bright out here.