the essential
A critical essay takes an uncompromising look at the series and their impact on our lives.
For several years now, the French have been consuming television and its programs in a delinearized manner, that is to say à la carte and delayed on major platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney +, Apple TV +, Warner, etc. . Even traditional channels have embarked on this path of “replay” and we recently saw TF1 launch TF1 +, M6 launch M6 + and the Canal + group launch TV +.
Each time, the flagship product of these offers is the volume of TV series offered. The series have become essential. The share of the population with a subscription which allows them to watch unlimited videos on demand (VAD), series or films in France between 2016 and 2022 has exploded, for example from 30 to 78% among 18-year-olds. 24 years.
With sometimes pharaonic budgets, great directors investing in them, and dedicated festivals, the series which addresses an infinite number of themes has become a phenomenon. But a phenomenon on which we have rarely taken a critical look at the addiction it arouses or the biases it conveys.
It is this critical look at the series that the investigative book by Bertrand Cochard, associate professor and doctor of philosophy, who publishes “Vide à lademande” with the excellent L’écuée editions, takes. The author – who admits to being “a repentant series fan” – wants to take us away from the hagiography that the series enjoys and confront us with their impact on our ways of living and thinking. Decreased attention, sleep time, information overload, overexcitement, heightened consumerism, etc. : are we still masters of our time when it is captured by series?
Weaning?
Summoning the philosophers of Antiquity like Plato and his Republic to support his reflection, Bertrand Cochard calls on us to question the series “which convey codes, values, norms, around which we let us form a society, without ever allowing the imagination they construct to be openly questioned. »
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Bertrand Cochard also explains how the viewer of the series participates, in a “comfortable passivity”, in the digital economy and, as when he surfs the internet, emits data which will be captured and monetized by the major platforms. The serial fan, subject to recommendation algorithms, also finds himself trapped in filter bubbles, which prevent him from thinking for himself.
Should we therefore watch fewer series, at a time when our dependence on screens is debated in our society, particularly for the youngest? Difficult because “watching series [est] in solidarity with the current social organization. » Bertrand Cochard suggests “weaning off, relearning how to live and pace our time without the mediation of screens” or in any case by seeking to limit their use to become master of our free time again.
