As we take part in a Golden Age of Television where content has never been better, TV has become a “FOMO” experience, said writers from Grantland in an Imagine Park session this afternoon.
For those unfamiliar, FOMO is the latest crippling social syndrome that stands for “fear of missing out.” It perfectly describes people’s excitement about TV right now and our need to watch live because, “the stakes are too high to miss out,” Grantland writer Chris Ryan said. Grantland, an ESPN-owned site that covers television, movies, sports and pop culture, perfectly feeds the FOMO in all of us.
Tess Lynch from Grantland said, “sustaining a week-long conversation is a tough thing for a show to do,” so the site has created several podcasts, “pre-caps” and columns for the various shows they cover in order to feed fans’ content cravings.
“We figure out what each show demands coverage-wise that our readers will be interested in and it’s different for each show,” said Emily Yoshida, Associate Editor, Hollywood Prospectus, at Grantland.
If online platforms like Grantland have one challenge, it’s content overload. From FX to HBO to AMC to Comedy Central and all the reality television shows Grantland writes about, cable is not running short of television shows to get these conversations started – and that’s not even including their sports coverage! It’s a good time to be a TV consumer and an engaged fan online.
“[Grantland] assumes that people want to dig really deep into these shows,” Tess Lynch said. “We assume they want to discover more programming that might interest them…that they are also watching on the second screen looking for different ways to engage themselves in the fictional world.”