{"id":299216,"date":"2026-02-15T10:50:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T10:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/299216\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T10:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T10:50:08","slug":"did-you-watch-heated-rivalry-immediately-and-love-it-if-not-are-you-dead-inside-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/299216\/","title":{"rendered":"Did you watch Heated Rivalry immediately, and love it? If not, are you dead inside? \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was a kid, there were occasional TV shows<\/a> that everyone watched. I would look at Dallas with my parents, my mother tutting in disapproval whenever JR got up to anything sexual. (When he committed fraud or double-crossed people, she wasn\u2019t so bothered.) We watched Roots, which for the first time gave me some inkling of how deeply racism was \u2013 and still is \u2013 uncomfortably ingrained into American culture.<\/p>\n

The fact that I still remember those shows is partially because there was far less choice. Ask me to name my viewing highlights from the last five years, and I\u2019d struggle to remember.<\/p>\n

Every week The Irish Times \u2013 and most other newspapers (if we can still call them that) \u2013 publishes the details of forthcoming TV shows. Unless you were to give up work and stare at a screen full-time, it\u2019s impossible to watch all of it; so inevitably, you fall behind. For a while, myself and Herself kept a physical list of shows we wanted to check out, but it grew so long that we stopped adding to it. It\u2019s collecting dust somewhere.<\/p>\n

We have tried to be ruthless. When we move on to something new, we can abandon it after the first or second episode. Yet that can feel like a waste of time, plus there\u2019s always a niggling worry that we didn\u2019t give it a chance. We choose shows based on what we might find interesting or entertaining, or what\u2019s in the everyone\u2019s-talking-about-it category.<\/p>\n

Yet in the relentless push of social media<\/a>, everyone\u2019s talking about everything. Every show is the best (or worst) ever made, they\u2019ve all been turned into memes, they all have some quality of capturing the zeitgeist. A zeitgeist can now last a fortnight, and we certainly can\u2019t keep up. Most series we get to have been out for a year or more. We know people far behind us.<\/p>\n

It tends to generate an odd cultural pressure. Heated Rivalry<\/a> recently produced that kind of buzz. You had to watch it, straight away, and love it: if you didn\u2019t, you were dead inside and possibly homophobic. Yet, contradictorily, social media provided enough information about the show to save you the bother of watching it at all. I haven\u2019t, yet I know it\u2019s about gay<\/a> hockey players. I know what \u201cI will go to the cottage\u201d means. Online and on TV seem to be meshing into each other.<\/p>\n

You can argue that it\u2019s all too much \u2013 \u201ccultural burnout\u201d is now a thing \u2013 or you could argue that it\u2019s nice to have choice, to have TV shows that appeal to different sorts of people.<\/p>\n

Without doubt, some excellent shows are being made. Desperate for new \u201ccontent\u201d, the streamers are even willing to indulge genuine creativity.<\/p>\n

Yet still I\u2019m suspicious. In the same way that Spotify tells you what music you like, I can\u2019t help but wonder how much of this is driven by algorithms, by identifying particular demographic groups and carefully devising how much drama, violence, sex and nostalgia that group likes to consume. Mix it up in the right proportions, choose a soundtrack from their youth, and you\u2019ve got another show that everyone\u2019s talking about. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018It\u2019s important for ice hockey players to be clean!\u2019 I jot down during Heated Rivalry\u2019s shower sceneOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Or at least, that seems to be the formula. It doesn\u2019t always work. So, the streamers release more and more shows, in the hope that some of them will prove to be a hit. It\u2019s a relentless torrent that\u2019s impossible to keep up with. It\u2019s impossible to keep up with any of it.<\/p>\n

Boo hoo. First-world problems. But the massive production of popular culture increasingly resembles scrolling through social media. Have a look; if it doesn\u2019t work, move on to the next thing. Watching a show, or watching a TikTok about a show, blurs into the same thing: just so long as you get that dopamine hit and then crave another. It\u2019s not just teenagers who can be addicted to this. You can too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I was a kid, there were occasional TV shows that everyone watched. I would look at Dallas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[93,61,60,4829,709,41143,58],"class_list":{"0":"post-299216","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-lgbtq","12":"tag-magazine","13":"tag-sean-moncrieff","14":"tag-social-media"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}