There’s something magical about streaming television. Like a modern-day Alice tumbling down a 75” rabbit hole, I sometimes disappear into a streaming void, emerging hours later with a vague recollection of sunlight, several empty snack wrappers and the unsettling realization that I’ve just watched an entire Japanese reality dating show for seniors looking for their last attempt at love.
Take my recent binge of Squid Game Season 2 on Netflix. Along with 126 million others worldwide, I was glued to the screen with the tenacity of a toddler refusing to leave a candy store. The irony wasn’t lost on me: while the characters kept voting to continue their deadly games with a “just one more” mentality, there I was, episode after episode, still in my pajamas at 4 PM, watching people make terrible life choices while actively making my own. My wife’s increasingly pointed reminders about dinner plans that evening went unheeded. Like a true Squid Game contestant warrior, I soldiered on. (“Honey, I’ll be ready in five minutes.” Spoiler Alert: I was not ready in five minutes.)
The streaming revolution makes me nostalgic for my childhood TV experience with RTM 1 and RTM 2. Back then, nothing was on demand. To find out what was showing on that day, we had to consult the newspaper. It always puzzled me then that shows started at oddly specific times, like 6:47 PM. Thankfully, someone eventually decided it was simpler to synchronize everything to start on the hour—and to broadcast in colour.
Everyone watched the same shows, or close to it. If you didn’t enjoy the American series about an annoyingly upbeat crime solving truck driver and his obnoxious pet chimpanzee (complete with out-of-sync subtitles taking up a third of the screen), your alternative was a riveting local talk show. Here, you’d find a professor in a bush jacket, sporting impressive sideburns, passionately discussing the benefits of continuous flooding irrigation in the paddy fields of Sekinchan.
Fast-forward to today, and Squid Game somehow managed to unite a global audience in our fragmented world—proof that nothing brings humanity together quite like watching other humans make catastrophically bad decisions for money. It’s a rare unicorn in our current entertainment landscape where we are spoiled for choice, from streaming platforms to YouTube to shortform videos on TikTok.
Streaming may be the pinnacle of modern convenience, but it’s missing that communal magic—those moments when everyone tuned in at the same time, on the same channel, to watch the same thing. Today, we disappear into our personal rabbit holes of formulaic Korean dramas, badly re-enacted true crime docs or thrashy dating reality series, emerging hours later with nothing to talk about except, “Have you seen this series?”
Maybe that’s why Squid Game struck such a chord. For one blessed moment, we weren’t just consuming our algorithmically programmed personalized content—we were all in it together, collectively screaming at our screens, united in our judgment of characters making exactly the same poor choices we’d probably make ourselves.