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Laura Slattery: The Crown is a perfect show for this age of ‘second screen’ television

Streamers are adjusting to a universe in which the smartphone is the ‘first screen’ and TV has become ‘ambient’ visual muzak

Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth in The Crown. The final six episodes of the series will drop on Netflix later this week. Photograph: Justin Downing/Netflix

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Laura Slattery
Tue Dec 12 2023 - 06:00

Dictionary publishers sending around their words of the year picks has reminded me that there was a time when the concept of “second screening” — now so unremarkable we rarely bother using the term — was once so novel it merited highlighting.

“Second screening”, shortlisted for word of the year by Oxford University Press in 2012, was usually explained as the phenomenon of watching television while keeping an eye on a “second” device such as a smartphone, tablet or laptop.

It wasn’t long after this that academics started writing papers politely suggesting this might be the wrong way around.

Now it seems obvious: for more time than we would like to admit, it is our smartphones that are our “first” screen. That big rectangular thing on the other side of the sitting room is a high-definition halo. It might come into focus, it might not. The real source of intrigue lies in our detachable hand appendages.

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My theory is that the habit, ingrained in so many of us, explains some of the disparity between the critical panning of the first four episodes of the final series of Netflix’s The Crown and the kinder reception afforded it by half-watching viewers who found it silly but still entertaining fluff.

Critics are paid to give their full attention to the stuff they watch. For the rest of us, that’s optional. So one person’s crassly objectionable royal dreck becomes another person’s perfect drama for the age of the second screen — the second screen being whichever one that’s showing The Crown.

I’m not saying these later episodes were specifically written for people who were simultaneously alternating between doomscrolling, playing Words With Friends and refreshing a live scores app, but I am saying that’s how I consumed it.

After all, like much of the target audience, I had “seen” the last few months of Princess Diana’s life before. While earlier seasons of The Crown somehow radiated period-drama prestige and the sense of a history lesson made flesh, the yacht-accessorised events of 1997 had already been “released” as a visceral, in-your-face tabloid soap opera with a shocking ending.

For those old enough to remember how ubiquitous Diana was that summer, these episodes were essentially a repeat.

As for the “tell, don’t show” dialogue, that made it doubly tough to lose track. Characters continually spelling out what they are thinking and how they are feeling is regularly castigated as “bad writing”, but it does have the dismal advantage of being stupidly easy to follow.

You can invite fine actors to showcase complex feelings through facial expressions and body language, but viewers might not happen to be glancing at the screen as they give us their best nose flares and subtlest lip trembles. Better to have Diana’s ghost pop up as the spectral manifestation of their thoughts and externalise their emotional state for the benefit of a semi-distracted audience. That way nobody needs to look up.

Television’s diminished second-screen status is not the reason why The Crown’s creator Peter Morgan went down the posthumous vision route, of course: Diana had a vivid afterlife in the minds of the people she left behind, he says, so she deserved “special treatment narratively”.

Coincidentally, however, the suggestion is afoot across the industry that commissioners are adjusting their content to make it more palatable — more suitably dumb, if you like — for an era in which television is the moving wallpaper filling out our peripheral vision. The New Yorker calls this “ambient television” and has singled Netflix out for pioneering the genre.

In the early years of “second screening”, it often seemed that broadcasters’ solution to the smartphone distraction problem was to contrive moments self-consciously designed to go viral. Scenes and segments felt engineered with social media impact in mind. But this shouty “remember us” tactic is now old-school. The new strategy is not to compete with social content, but to semi-apologetically attempt to co-exist in the same universe.

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In July, a week into the US actors’ strike and two months into the screenwriters’ stoppage, the writer and director Justine Bateman gave an interview to the Hollywood Reporter in which she flagged a modern commissioning trend.

“I’ve heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that ‘this isn’t second screen enough’. Meaning, the viewer’s primary screen is their phone and the laptop and they don’t want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off,” said Bateman.

“I heard somebody use this term before: they want a ‘visual muzak’. When showrunners are getting notes like that, are they able to do their best work? No.”

Bad luck, television, you had a good run.

Known to a generation of viewers as Mallory Keaton from Family Ties, computer science graduate Bateman was speaking in her capacity as a consultant to the negotiating committee of actors’ union Sag-Aftra on the subject of artificial intelligence (AI). This she described as the “end of the road” for Hollywood.

Before this cheery AI apocalypse, I guess we have some more visual muzak and/or the six final episodes of The Crown to enjoy, and on the basis that the Netflix budget will doubtless tell the story better than Heat magazine did at the time, I’m looking forward to its version of William meeting Kate.

Still, given I used to like watching all four corners of a television set at once, I should probably work on reclaiming my pre-smartphone level of concentration at some point.

At the weekend, I watched The Giggle, a new episode of Doctor Who by Russell T Davies in which a monster derived from Stooky Bill — the ventriloquist’s dummy used by John Logie Baird in his early television experiments — “hides” inside every screen and then sends everybody mad with its deranged laugh.

It’s a genius idea, but a force formidable and sneaky enough to send the same unavoidable signal to all humans at once? Come on, now. Not even Emily in Paris was that powerful.

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