TV Trivia: Now or Never
It's a little past prime time, really.
Yesterday, I said trivia gets less or more interesting with the passing years. Some facts get more unfamiliar and so have a greater chance to be surprising. Other times, the surrounding context for facts gets more unfamiliar, resulting in facts themselves being less easily understood. Like a joke that requires too much setup before the punchline.
When working on the entries for Ubercross T’s TV trivia, I could feel the weight of that perspective. Because while TV trivia is still interesting to people today, I’m not sure about its future.
The last twenty years would seem to be huge boom times for onscreen content, between the rise of streaming services, YouTube, and phones with video displays. But for a trivia writer, the explosion of content is almost an obstacle. With so many viewing options, could I even be sure that four people in the pub have watched any random four shows?
It’s not nearly as likely as once it was that you’re watching the same things as your neighbors. The days where we’d gather at the company water cooler to discuss the latest Friends or Seinfeld—or Brady Bunch, or I Love Lucy—are pretty much behind us.
Now, the international market for TV has meant huge audiences for some more recent fare, allowing The Office and Game of Thrones to set worldwide records for viewership. But those numbers reflect more people watching TV in total, not percentages of the total. And the metrics have changed in the streaming era. Nielsen families used to tell us how popular any TV show was or wasn’t, but only Netflix knows its true audience numbers, and except to announce a few hits, it isn’t sharing.
It’s not completely hopeless for the trivia writer. Some characters and stories do still make an impact on the cultural imagination. Or they can get a second life via reruns, reboots, or revivals, like the three mostly-TV properties in Sam Logan’s latest comic strip below. (Each has dabbled in other media, but TV gave them their biggest audiences.)
(Character designers really do like using the red, green, and blue of a classic TV set, don’t they?)
Nilanth Yogadasan of CineNerdle does a “notability check” before deciding to reference a movie, looking at figures on IMDb and Letterboxd. I’ve done this myself, and while some of the results were what I expected, a notable minority were not. Movies I was sure had bombed were much bigger than I thought, while movies I remembered well were not nearly as well-remembered by the public. Though it must be said, IMDb and Letterboxd don’t always agree with each other, either.
Even so, some sort of check like that does seem like a good idea when writing trivia today. You’ve got to get out of your own head, sometimes. Maybe the current crop of available shows still presents some fertile ground for trivia questions, but it just takes more work to understand which ones are known. More work…and a bit more humility.
