Why we rewatch

Or, What Star Trek shares with Mad Men, Bojack Horseman, and Gilmore Girls

Scholars will look back at this post as the moment this blog really became a blog — because I’m going to start off by half-jokingly apologizing for posting so little. Between end-of-semester duties and some really bad allergies, I haven’t had a lot of spare energy. During that time, most of my Star Trek thoughts went into a series of podcasts (which I will be sharing with you once enough of them have come out) as well as an informal “book launch” at the greatest academic bookstore in the US, the Seminary Co-op. At that event, my friend Anna Kornbluh — whose amazing book Immediacy, or The Style of Too-Late Capitalism you should check out — asked me a question that initially seemed strange: why do people rewatch the same show over and over? For me, it’s a self-evident behavior, but apparently there are some people (including her) who don’t do it and find the whole idea bizarre. There are so many new shows in the world! Why go back over something you’ve already seen?

A fun fact is that Star Trek fans were among the first rewatchers. What kept the franchise going after The Original Series’s brief and only moderately successful prime time run was the value of its syndicated reruns, which fans would watch over and over. Journalistic accounts of the Star Trek phenomenon were incredulous about this, disturbed that these losers could content themselves with watching “the same 78 episodes” endlessly (the figure of 78 is explicitly mentioned in several sources I’ve seen). The direct-to-syndication format of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine built on this success — I remember staying up late to watch the daily Next Generation reruns that filled the gap between new episodes and being fascinated to figure out the broad historical markers (e.g., if their uniforms have that weird line through the black shoulder part, and especially if Tasha Yar appears, it’s an early one…).

In my early tentative researches, I was joining a long tradition of fans who tried to piece together the shape of the Star Trek universe using the random fragments we had access to in those pre-streaming and even pre-DVD days. I miss that feeling of serendipity, which is surprisingly hard to come by in our more advanced era. If I’m in the mood to watch a “random” Star Trek episode, I’ll usually find myself scrolling through the listing endlessly without picking anything. (Apparently Paramount Plus now has “linear” channels that may duplicate the old ways, though I suspect that, like the Heroes and Icons cable channel, they likely play everything in chronological order rather than skipping around.)

So on the one hand, there’s a scholarly aspect to rewatching. And that’s why certain genres—ranging from “prestige” fare like Mad Men to intricately referential comedies like 30 Rock or Bojack Horseman—reward rewatching more than others. Many “prestige” shows are clearly designed to be viewed at least twice, once for the surprise reveal and a second time so you can recognize that it was “there all along” (though a spoiler can help you skip ahead to the second watch the first time through, as I did with Westworld, for instance). For me, one sign of the decline of “prestige” TV is how few shows actually reward rewatching anymore. To give an example, we once tried rewatching the first season of Stranger Things in anticipation of the second and found it completely inert and unengaging—once you know what the monster is, it’s over.

It can’t just be the scholarly aspect, though. I have rewatched Mad Men—not to mention Sopranos, which holds no such intricate mysteries—more than the requisite two times. And that’s because there’s a pleasure for me in inhabiting the show’s world, dwelling in its unique aesthetic and emotional tone. The same obviously holds for Star Trek. There’s a comfort in the familiar settings and characters, the repeated story formulas, even the distinctive style of acting.

What is most attractive, though, at least to me, is not the fictional universe as such, not the high technology or the post-scarcity utopia (which is barely fleshed out on-screen), but the utopian workplace. Star Trek is a space where it’s okay to be smart, where it’s okay to make work your top priority, where chosen friendship is more valued than family (how many Star Trek characters are explicitly orphaned or alienated from their families?!), and where everyone respects and listens to everyone else, no matter how absurd or impossible their concern appears to be. “You say reality is subtly changing around you every few hours, Mr. Worf? Alright, let’s investigate!” As someone who often felt isolated or even excluded for being smart, who has never wanted to start a family, who seldom felt really respected or taken seriously (though, to be fair, what child does?) — the appeal is obvious.

But it’s not just about childhood nostalgia. My Esteemed Partner and I do usually have a “nostalgia” show going, and those tend to be one-and-done, if we even continue with them beyond a few episodes. I am, after all, a humanities professor and cannot turn off my analytical mind. I wouldn’t keep returning if Star Trek wasn’t produced by smart people who value what I value about Star Trek—and the segments of the franchise where it’s mostly not produced by such people (most notably the J.J. Abrams-directed films and Section 31) are not very rewatchable. The pleasures of my current rewatch are more about noticing how they struck a balance between an episodic format and the expectation of continuity—when and how they introduce new plot points, which seeds planted in earlier episodes are picked up later and which are forgotten—and how they tended to group together episodes by theme to provide a “vibe” of continuity even when the plots were self-contained. Similarly, my exploration of the tie-in novels and comics has been guided less by a simple desire for “more” than by the window they provide into what seemed possible within the Star Trek universe at various stages of the franchise’s development.

In other words, I don’t just rewatch to revisit who I was. I rewatch because I keep finding new rewards as the scholar and critic I’ve become. The world of Star Trek (including what I can infer about the world of those who make Star Trek) is a world I still feel comfortable not just visiting, but inhabiting. My case is obviously unique in many ways, but I don’t believe that what I’m saying applies only to me. No matter how much overanalysis and extra research I bring to the table, I suspect the basic impulse is the same as with, for example, My Esteemed Partner’s habit of putting Gilmore Girls on in the background. The rewatcher wants to return to a familiar and comfortable space. What it says about me that Mad Men and Bojack Horseman (the latter of which I’ve had on a rewatch loop for many years) feel like such familiar and comfortable spaces to me is perhaps a topic for another post.