I have a confession to make. When nobody’s watching, I doomscroll through videos on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, immersing myself in bite-sized chunks of my favorite series and movies whittled down to a single scene.
This guilty pleasure has turned me into a virtual, but joyous, addict. And guess what? I’m discovering I’m not alone.
From Forrest Gump, to When Harry Met Sally, to the current romcom series Nobody Wants This (with a rabbi who falls in love with a shiksa), the algorithms found my sweet spot, and I’m hooked.
TV watching is being transformed from streaming entire movies to watching individual segments, giving us a movie jolt without sitting still for 90 minutes. Sometimes it’s just one classic scene. Think of the “My name is Michael Corleone” scene from The Godfather.
Other times, you’ll be served different clips from the same movie, as is the case with Forrest Gump. Forrest runs like the wind, Forrest goes off to war, Forrest and Jenny walk hand in hand with their little boy. Each scene is powerful, and harkens back to when I saw the movie in the theater. Sometimes I can recite the phrases, as is the case with 1942’s Casablanca, when Humphrey Bogart tells Ingrid Bergman, “Here’s looking at you kid.” Nostalgia from watching the movie repeatedly with my parents as a teenager washes over me like a warm wave.
This micro-storytelling trend keeps viewers coming back and can boost a creator’s account by thousands of followers. Some of these clips are liked hundreds of thousands of times, and commenters find a sense of community.
Washington Post writer Heather Kelly wrote that “instead of seeking specific parts of shows or movies out, people are shown things without looking for it.”
This made me realize that I’m a slave to random people’s ideas of what they think I need to see. Even though I don’t know these people, I’m grateful for the time and energy they spend giving me the opportunity to go to my room, shut the door, and go down the endless rabbit hole in peace.
Cristel Russell, a professor of marketing at Pepperdine University, told Kelly, “That’s the weird thing about algorithms. You wonder, is this a universal experience or has the internet figured out that I’m very weird in a specific way?”
But the less-than-ideal production values make it somewhat of a challenge to watch.
The pirated clips made by complete unknowns like Mark Bisraya or Ayan Ahmed, who I randomly found in my feed last night, aren’t well-produced. So the scofflaws don’t get caught, they use a variety of techniques like inverting the picture, using white flashes in the middle of sentences, speeding up the voices, or creating a split screen with the exact same scene. There are also annoying emojis that pop up, not to mention simultaneous lower-third ads that you have to close in order to see the movie details.
But I’m so engrossed in the content that it doesn’t stop me from watching. I can watch ten in a row, scrolling past ads for must-have makeup or leather pants, and feel satisfied.
The worst part about watching – other than spoilers – is not knowing what movie is playing. In the description, they use hashtags like #romcom #movies or #oldmovies. To escape prosecution, they don’t put the name of the movie anywhere on the screen, or give a description. So, say you love the scene and think you want to stream the movie; good luck if you can’t remember the names of the actors. I’ll Google something like “man meets woman in bar criticizes her she yells at him.” Surprisingly, I can find it after a few iterations of the same search. If I hear the character’s name, it pops up on the first try.
Studio execs are none too happy about it, and are strategically battling to take down and replace sloppily edited, pirated content. But, in some cases, companies have realized those short clips actually boost viewership, and Gen Z often discovers movies and series through algorithmic videos first.
Netflix, Amazon MGM Studio, Hulu, Prime Video, Starz, Warner Bros, Disney+, and others create their own mini-segments with the names of the TV shows and movies, descriptions, and a link to stream the whole movie. Sometimes I find these official scene clips too sterile, and often they aren’t poignant. There’s something charming about the slapdash way the fakes are put together.
My son, who worked in the entertainment industry for a few years, says it stops companies from making money off the highly produced, original content put together by tons of talented people. He’s right. And he said I’m rotting my brain, deteriorating my attention span, and wiring my brain for instant gratification. Also correct. Of course, he watches these minute-versions all the time, too.
My editor, Garrett Searight, told me a story about how he told someone how impressed he was with an interview he did with a band. The interviewer said, “Did you watch it on YouTube or listen to the podcast?” And he said, “I watched the entire thing, sporadically, in roughly three-minute clips on TikTok as they showed up on my feed.”
Exactly my point. We are all part of this newfangled way of watching TV, whether it’s good for us or not, and we might as well come out of the closet and admit it.
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