Comfort Viewing

Everyone seems to be rewatching the prestige shows of the early 21st century lately. (Yes, we are one-quarter of the way through this century. I don’t know how to process that either.) Every week, I hear that someone else is working their way through “The Sopranos.” (Consensus: It holds up.) I have no fewer than three friends who are rewatching “Mad Men.” (“I can’t believe we used to get shows like this,” one mused, perhaps referring obliquely to the heaps of Mid TV washing up on our streaming shores these days.) Don’t even get me started on the “Girls” aficionados — all rediscovering how droll and nostalgic and perfectly of its time it was.

Why rewatch a show when we have so little time on earth? Why watch something you’ve already seen when there’s nowhere near enough time to make it through all the queues and wish lists and playlists and recommendations dashed down in the Notes app?

There’s the quality factor: I’m not taking a risk on a flashy new show that could turn out to be a total snooze when I already know something older is good. Then there’s the element of comfort: It’s cozy to revisit characters that feel like old friends, plots that we can recall broadly, even if we can’t exactly conjure the details. Nostalgia figures in — I remember watching “The Sopranos” in my first post-college apartment, on VHS, on a 13-inch TV set that had a built-in VCR.

Rewatching demands a different type of attention than a first watch does. You know what’s going to happen, so you don’t have to make sure you’re clocking each turn of the story. You can focus on the stuff that might have escaped you on first viewing — the sets, the actors’ tiniest gestures. You can wander around a scene without worrying you’re going to lose the plot.

I had the blissful experience of rewatching “Fleabag” recently. It came out in the U.S. in 2016, hardly a relic of an earlier era but long enough ago that I was ready to reimmerse myself in its daffy, heartbreaking, ultimately redeeming world. On first watch, I was so enchanted by the show’s unconventional style (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as Fleabag, regularly addresses the camera, breaking the fourth wall) that I paid less attention to the supporting characters — Olivia Colman as Fleabag’s deliciously passive-aggressive stepmother, Sian Clifford as her uptight sister. On this repeat viewing, I was able to appreciate these performances wholeheartedly.

I was chatting with a friend about rewatching things, about how, despite the consolations of getting reacquainted with an old favorite, I can’t help but feel like I’m wasting time that I should be spending on things I haven’t seen yet. My friend pointed out that we go to museums and galleries to look at a painting we love again and again without worrying that our time would be better spent on paintings we haven’t seen. Why should TV be any different? Rewatching is its own cultural activity, not necessarily inferior or redundant. If it’s pleasurable, soothing, enlightening — there’s really no need to judge the practice any further.