The U.S. lost in the World Cup yesterday, but it’s still moving on to the knockout stage (to face Belgium Tuesday). Which means that my son and I will still have at least one more opportunity to root the home team on.
Thanks to the wonders of DVR, my 23-year-old son, Colin, and I have been watching quite a bit of the World Cup. It’s been pretty fun: Colin’s played soccer most of his life, and he’s such a fan of the game that he sometimes calls it “football,” like the rest of the world. (Any self-respecting Denver Broncos fan should know better, but I try not to correct him.) It’s an area where his knowledge vastly outstrips my own, and he spends much of the matches talking to me as much as watching—chatting about the best players on the field, different tendencies, new strategies. I think it’s pretty considerate that he treks back home to watch crucial matches with his parents. Is it because we have a better television set? Perhaps. But it’s still nice to see him.
We can be pretty critical of television around here at Plugged In. But sometimes it can bring people together.
It’s rarer these days, I think. We live in an era when entertainment, especially television, is getting progressively more niche. Smaller and smaller portions of our population agree about what’s worth watching. And given that the average U.S. home has more televisions than people, there’s little reason to compromise. Mom can watch HGTV upstairs. Little Suzy can watch Nickelodeon downstairs. Teen Bobby goes to ESPN on his phone. Dad checks out HBO on his tablet. And so on.
But even as programs grow ever more niche and cater to ever smaller audiences, communities spring up around them. We’d never recommend HBO’s Game of Thrones or Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black to anyone, but there’s no question that people talk about these shows, and others, incessantly. Viewing parties spring up around the release of popular programs. ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars, a program that drew a miniscule 2.7 million people for its Season 5 premiere June 17, was still by far the most shared, tweeted about and mentioned show on social networks for the week, garnering a “second screen” score (implying viewers were using a laptop, tablet or phone to communicate with friends while watching) of 90,883. I don’t exactly know what those numbers mean, but in comparison, runner-up True Blood clocked in at only 32,358.
I don’t watch much TV when I’m not on the job, but the shows I do watch are those which I can talk about with other people. Lost was big in my circles back in the day. Sometimes I’d spend as much time talking about the latest episode as watching it.
In television’s infancy, The Mickey Mouse Club was one of the biggest shows going. And we’re still building clubs around our favorite programs. Communities. Yeah, they’re shallow communities, and sometimes based on not-that-great stuff. But in an age in which it’s easy for us to grow isolated behind our technology, or communicate with others solely through a string of selfies, maybe there’s a little merit in them still.
And then there are certain events that can still pull more of us together. The Super Bowl for Americans. The Olympics. And now the World Cup, too.
For years, the World Cup has been a global obsession. And slowly it’s becoming must-see-TV in the United States, too. According to a story from ABC News, more than half of us listened to a World Cup match while at work. Some of us, like my son and I, are watching it pretty closely. But even those of you who aren’t tuned in probably have heard a little something about it—that the U.S. is moving on, that one of the best soccer players in the world (Uruguay’s Luis Suarez) took a bite out of someone’s shoulder (and has since been suspended). You’ve been drawn into a larger community for a few weeks.
Maybe it’s unfair to say that the Cup is bringing the world together, exactly. Certainly, fans of Italy (the team victimized by Suarez’ chomp and which lost to Uruguay 1-0) aren’t as likely to hug their Uruguayan brethren right about now. A few fans of the U.S. fumed over aggressive, borderline play by Ghana in the teams’ opening match.
But some of those same fans didn’t even know there was a Ghana before—much less that they had a pretty good soccer team. So that’s improvement, right?
With a few exceptions, the Cup has been both exciting and sporting. Players help one another up with far more frequency than they bite. And all across the world, fans of different teams are gathering for gigantic viewing parties—people with different rooting interests but a common passion, standing underneath the sun or stars, watching teams battle on the pitch by way of huge TVs.
Maybe sports really can bring the world together a little. And maybe, occasionally, television can too.
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