For those who, like me, have followed “Stranger Things” since its premiere, . The series began with a nostalgic atmosphere, with plot and characters that developed little by little. Over time, he began to always say the obvious, repeat emotions out loud and abandon any sense of urgency in the adventure.
And I believe this is not an isolated case: critics pointed out similar problems in the last season of “Game of Thrones”, in several recent Marvel productions and in huge audiences like “Emily in Paris”, which are entertainment that works even without full attention.
The literature on attention helps to understand why this type of choice has become attractive to studios. In a recent review, George Loewenstein and Zachary Wojtowicz show that, in environments of information overload, people tend to adjust their consumption to reduce the demand for cognitive effort.
In other words, much of contemporary consumption occurs under divided attention, with the viewer alternating between the screen and the cell phone or everyday activities. Content that requires inference, memory and subtext reading becomes more difficult to follow; content that explains everything becomes more efficient in this context where .
However, films and series have resources that other media do not: image, framing, movement, pause, rhythm. It is precisely this combination that allows us to show, suggest and construct meaning without having to explain everything in words. If a character holds a steaming cup of coffee, the image already communicates the essential point.
When this adaptation to divided attention reaches the script, the effect has been what we have seen: dialogues start to carry functions that previously belonged to staging and framing. Characters explain what they feel, verbalize conflicts that are already clear and describe actions that the viewer has just seen. Not because screenwriters have become less competent, but because the system has started to give preference to stories that survive even when seen at a glance.
Once platforms organize their decisions around retention, abandonment and viewing continuity metrics, the objective is no longer to create engagement but to avoid losing viewers in the flow. None of this implies demonizing the public or defending a single production model, as different media make sense for different times of the week. Podcasts accompany household chores or a run; Short videos work well for breaks from work. But when I sit down to watch a movie or a series, I expect engagement, not the feeling that someone is explaining what I’m already seeing.
Perhaps the good news lies precisely in the growing complaints from viewers themselves and in the recent success of denser works such as “”, “”, “” and “”. These cases suggest that it is not true that every narrative needs to operate under divided attention. There is space, and there is demand, for stories that trust the viewer’s intelligence and recover the strength of the audiovisual: after all, showing is still stronger than explaining.
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