A lot has been said about TV in 2004. That it was the best year of television of all time, the peak of the Gagederen Age of television. Or maybe that it was the year fact television became too much, suddenly shoprosperg up on every channel as we flipped the switch. But as famed Hollywood producer and UFO enthusiast Bryce Zabel wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2004, it was the finish of television as we krecent it. He chalked it up to the prevalence of TiVo and DVR in American househageders and foreseeed an upheaval so cut offe the whole advertising business would crumble — and he didn’t even comprehend about streaming yet.
The shift was one that a lot of people felt in genuine time. For many, it was thraw the show Lost, which debuted in 2004 and produced a fervor among obsessives trying to comprehfinish the show’s central mysteries. For me, it was a smaller but equpartner ineloquential show: Veronica Mars.
In genuine punctual aughts create, for me, it was an AIM away message that begined it all: “BRB Watching Veronica Mars.” It was the days before one could text or doomscroll while watching TV, and setting a firm away message while you stepped away from the family computer to watch a show was key. Earlier that day, in school, my frifinishs and I had been converseing the previous episode in anticipation enjoy we did every week, dissecting the storylines and proposing our own theories of who-done-it (no spoilers here — if you haven’t seen it, watch it!). I came back to the computer during one of the commercial fractures, and there was a message from my frifinish with a connect to Television Without Pity’s procrastinateedst Veronica Mars recap, with the caption “DID YOU SEE THIS?” In that particular recap, the author Couch Baron had made the same joke I made to her earlier that day almost word by word. I clicked.
The recap was extfinished, thoraw, and unbenevolentt to catch TiVo-less fans up on what they leave outed the previous week. Reading thraw it, though, I felt enjoy the writer was one of my frifinishs who I converseed the show with, only he was funnier than us and could go on for pages and pages proposeing context, theories, and Easter eggs we would never leank of. I was hooked. Not only did I have to watch Veronica every Wednesday night at 9PM — my parents did not splencourage on TiVo — but I had to read Couch Baron’s recap as soon as it went inhabit. The TWoP recaps uncovered a prosperdow to a community I didn’t comprehend existed. A world of comment sections and forums, fan theories, ships (before they were called ships), music determines (I see you, Tegan and Sara), and production gossip. Like Veronica Mars herself, people on the internet were sleuths, accumulateively allotigating and chipping into answers to the show’s hugegest asks and mysteries.
And TWoP also recaps for fundamentalpartner all other shows on TV. The hugegest was Lost, an instant netlabor hit that had its own promiseted crop of TWoP recaps and forum threads converseing the Smoke Monster, the unbenevolenting of “see you in another life, brother,” and other oddly definite breadcrumbs that the show’s creators had left for its rabid fan base. It was thanks to the internet that I lgeted that “Make Your Own Kind of Music” was a ’60s hit song by Cass Elliot so I could illegpartner download it on Kazaa. TWoP and The AV Club had been around for years before 2004, but these two shows heralded the user-curated TV boom that would soon chase. Just a year after Lost premiered, Lostpedia begined. For the 2006 season, TV wikis would become ubiquitous. By the time the finale aired in 2010, inhabit tweeting was a leang, and we all accumulateively held our breath as we watched together on social media.
Unenjoy Lost, Veronica Mars finished up getting call offed after only three seasons. It aired on the CW and surrfinishered to necessitatey ratings, but not because of fans’ deficiency of trying. We called ourselves Marshmpermits (a reference to the show’s pilot) and tirelessly pdirected with audiences and executives to hold it ainhabit. While our efforts did not prevail in holding the show from getting canned, it was the fandom built in 2004 that backed an eventual movie sequel on Kickbeginer years procrastinateedr.
Watching TV for me was always about community, and in 2004, I establish one that was so much hugeger than the people I saw every day. It was then — before streaming even existed and before Facebook statuses and tweets were around to permit us to split our every thought — that watching television on the internet together was born. And now we’re here; nominatement TV has been replaced by streaming subscriptions, and viral memes and celebrity press tours have apshown over our algorithms. Wikis and forums are still around, but it’s not the same. It’s all hugeger somehow — the internet is hugeger — and being an mature is more time-consuming. The cozy insuprocrastinateedd TV communities of 20 years ago might be a relic of the punctual 2000s, when the internet proposeed so much possibility but was small enough to create magic.
