Every show ever made is ours on demand. But television has never been so lonely

Every Tuesday morning started with a debrief, and theories of what each plot development meant, and what might come next.

More recently, there was Succession, revealing just that little bit more intrigue every week until all the speculation came to a head in an immensely satisfying final episode (note to Benioff and Weiss – that’s how you wrap up a story).

Like many shows these days, particularly on Netflix, 3 Body Problem was a season dump. As soon as the first episode was released, so was the last. Within a day of its release, I had devoured the whole season.

Now, I must wait for everyone else to catch up. Even if someone has started watching, their progression through the series needs to be checked, lest a debrief leads to spoilers.

We’ve lost the communal aspect of what is, at its essence, a solitary pursuit.

As counterintuitive as it may sound, sitting at home watching television can be a shared experience, either in real time through social media or a catch-up in the following days.

It applies equally to event television and live sport. Both are communal experiences; both are conversation-starters.

One of my vivid early childhood memories is the screen fading to black when Molly Jones died on A Country Practice, a favourite of my late mother. (It was also a favourite of David Bowie, who used to hang out with Iggy Pop watching ACP videos in Switzerland. Seriously – look it up!)

About 2.2 million Australians tuned in to Channel Seven in 1985 to see Molly succumb to leukaemia. That would be a viewership any television station would kill for today, let alone when Australia’s population was just 15.8 million (compared with 27 million in 2024).

I don’t remember much from 1985, but I’ll never forget that scene, or the discourse it spawned. Every overheard adult conversation, it seemed, was about poor Molly – an unwelcome encroachment on playtime with my original Star Wars figures (figures, it must be said, that could probably have paid off my mortgage had I kept them).

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With on-demand viewing, such cultural experiences are getting increasingly rare – an all-season dump puts everyone out of whack.

Don’t get me wrong. Having every television show, from every era, available on demand has its upsides. But we may just have lost something along the way.

And that’s a shame.

So, anyway, have you watched 3 Body Problem?