Loving a Good Hate-Watch

I used to think I was immune to the phenomenon of hate-watching. Then I started streaming The Acolyte on Disney+.

The nerdy Star Wars details aren’t necessary to understand: all you need to know is that I didn’t like the show from its outset. It is a strange mix of poorly executed fan service and lore-bending storytelling that conflicts with other beloved Star Wars properties. For this Star Wars fan of some decades, those two notes were enough “to let the hate flow through me.” Disney seems to have gotten the message from fans, since the show will not be returning for a second season.

In hindsight, I’m not sure why I even gave the series my time and attention. I’m an exhausted father of two preschoolers that works three jobs to make ends meet. Wisdom would dictate that I cut my losses and use the time for something more meaningful. What is it that drew me back to the show despite my repeated dissatisfaction with it? What does hate-watching do for me that I just can’t quit?

Over at the New York Times, film critic (and former Mbird Conference speaker) Alyssa Wilkinson asks “Why do so many of us watch things we think are bad?” She describes her own tendency to hate-watch, though from a decidedly different angle than my own sci-fi affections. This man’s The Acolyte is Wilkinson’s Emily in Paris, two very different shows that elicit very similar responses from their viewers.

You can only hate-watch a show that you theoretically should have loved — entertainment the algorithm pushed at you because it aligns with your tastes, an offering with a modicum of ambition behind it. It doesn’t even have to be a “watch” at all. You can hate-read books (better yet, a series of books), hate-listen to a maddening podcast, hate-scroll a social media feed that makes you stabby with superiority. […]

Your personal hate-watch might center on frontiersmen, zombies, finance bros or blind romances, but the principle is the same: You can only hate what could have been great. You hate it more because it’s getting shoved at you by an algorithm. And in fact, someone else might unironically love your hate-watch. It might even get nominated for Emmys.

In this way, hate-watching is really a perversion of some sort of deeper love. Wilkinson acknowledges her love for the genre of “women trying to make it in a challenging world” shows, and that it’s her attraction to that genre that inspires her hate-watching habits. This feels pretty on-point for Star Wars fans, who hate-watch just about any Star Wars property that’s come out in the past fifteen years (with the exclusion of Andor, let the reader understand).

Wilkinson outlines the commercial incentives that can lead to hate-watching, but she doesn’t stop there. Yes, she argues, TV has accepted the same premise as social media platforms: a click is a click, regardless of whether the content is funny or infuriating, and so the overall quality of TV has dropped. Still, she notes, it takes two to do the hate-watch tango, and so the viewer has his or her fair share to answer for. Here’s Wilkinson’s explanation:

But if I’m preaching here, I’m preaching to myself. Will I watch the rest of “Emily in Paris”? Of course. Do I anxiously await the new season of “And Just Like That …”? You betcha. At the end of an exhausting day, when I need to distract myself from my anxieties, sniping at some new, terrible show about ice skaters or lifestyle journalists or advice podcasters feels like comfort food.

After all, hate-watching something is not really the opposite of loving it. When I hate-watch the new season of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” I’m really expressing my own fandom, albeit a twisted one. A fan loves; a hate-watcher loathes but is irrevocably attached nonetheless. If I really don’t like a show, I just stop watching. To borrow a sentiment, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

Which is to say, there is a certain pleasure to hate-watching. It’s a form of distancing ourselves from the content at hand while, simultaneously, expressing our love for it at the same time. I hate-watch The Acolyte because it aspires to draw out my childhood wonder of Star Wars, and as it fails to do so, it only confirms how special the older Star Wars movies were all those years ago. It’s not just the snobbery of saying that the new doesn’t measure up, but it’s the disappointment that the magic is absent. One imagines that the hate-watchers of Emily In Paris have a similar response. Plenty of “girl in the world” viewers are disappointed when their life-informed vision of glitz and glamor isn’t manifested. The algorithm’s promise of validation doesn’t come to fruition, and as the old saying goes, the only thing better than being right is feeling wronged.

At the risk of psychoanalyzing everyone, we might find it true that the hate-watcher doth protest a little too much. We might even understand hate-watching as an act of hope, a desire to experience the joys and thrills we know from the past are available to us. It’s too much to call hate-watching an act of virtue, as if faith, hope, and love are somehow manifested in our mothlike attraction to bad TV. Instead, we might lump hate-watchers in with fans of beleaguered sports franchises whose teams are terrible. They watch the games, buy tickets, and wear jerseys, while also voicing the most critical complaints about the team they support. Both hate-watchers and sports fans share a love that transcends failure, search out the joys and highs that they have previously experienced, and voice their impassioned criticisms along the way.

Could it be true that, inside the jaded anti-Disney Star Wars nerd, there is a little child hoping to be thrilled once again? Inside the cadre of women hate-watching Emily in Paris, are there millions of women longing for that perfect mix of fashion, youth, foreign mystique, romance, and professional success? (I don’t know, I’ve never seen the show, but you get what I’m trying to say). The next time someone has an impassioned hate-watch story, then, we might observe their passions with a grain of salt. Behind the hatred, we might discover people are telling us something rich and powerful about what they truly love.