The Traitors and Mr Bates show that appointment TV is back – streamers watch out

The dawn of streaming turned us into Netflix nation, eyes glued to a dazzling line-up of shows to watch whenever we wanted, writes our chief TV critic Nick Hilton. Now, with scheduled smash hits such as ‘The Traitors’ and ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’, the watercooler moment is well and truly back. And it’s got the big boys of the small screen tuning in to a very real threat from the terrestrial world…

(BBC/ITV)

If TS Eliot measured out his life in “coffee spoons” then I, like so many people, have punctuated my existence, thus far, with square-eyed, slack-jawed moments in front of the gogglebox. Zoe Slater yelling, “You ain’t my mother!” at her sister Kat, only for Kat to yell back, “Yes I am!”. Ronaldinho lobbing David Seaman, or Mo Farah streaking home in Stratford. A leaping Arya Stark dispatching the Night King, or Elizabeth II’s funeral procession weaving through the streets of London. These are the moments that serve as the markers of a lifetime, and they share one quality: they all unfolded as appointment TV.

And, after a decade where content providers – from Netflix and Disney+ to BBC iPlayer and whatever Channel 4 is calling its streaming platform this week – have tried to supply audiences with, in the words of comedian Bo Burnham, “everything, all of the time”, live (or linear, as it’s sometimes called) TV is starting to reassert itself. It is a process that has privileged quantity over quality, to the detriment of television as a creative medium. But, whether it’s terrestrial game shows, prestigious international productions, or domestic dramas, likely starring Julie Hesmoldhalgh, live TV is coming back in a big way. Even the streamers, who set out to kill this model, are increasingly returning their programming to a drip-feed, rather like an arsonist smearing himself with ash and telling you you’ve “got a lovely home”. But why is 2024 the year that TV went live (again)?

Live television has long been the backbone of its industry, providing viewers with two comforting things: curation and community. Twenty years ago, most households only had a smattering of channels. A couple of BBCs, ITV and Channel 4, maybe Channel 5 if you were lucky. It meant that what you watched was dictated by what was on, and commissioners, for all their flaws, knew how to fill primetime slots with exciting, suspenseful programming. Think about the 30 million people who tuned in, back in 1986, to watch “Dirty” Den Watts serve his wife, Angie, with divorce papers in EastEnders. The population of the UK at that time was just 57 million; you were more likely to be watching than not. It rendered the question of whether EastEnders was “good” or not largely irrelevant. Watching became a way of understanding the national psyche.

The dawn of streaming turned us into a nation – a world – of individualised doom-scrollers, flicking through the options on Netflix each evening, until, having exhausted the possibilities, we switch over to Amazon Prime. I could spend a happy, but unhealthy, evening with zapper in hand, dancing through the diversity of options. Friends? No. Peaky Blinders? Nah. Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons? Not that, either. In the kitchenette at the office the next day, when questions are raised about the preceding night, it is hard to initiate intelligent conversation by saying, “I spent 45 minutes failing to decide what to put on, before settling in to rewatch Gilmore Girls for the fifth time this year.” It is enough to make you long for Leslie Grantham’s malevolent mug.

The dual principle of curation and community has been typified this year, already, by two fabulous BBC game shows: Gladiators and The Traitors. The former, an almost balletic fiesta of sanitised and spandexed violence, has been a surprise triumph. More than 6 million viewers tuned into its first episode back on screens, a staggering achievement when you consider that it was programmed against ITV’s long-running The Masked Singer, which managed just 3.7 million in the same time slot. Meanwhile, The Traitors, returning for its second outing, has broken records to become the biggest entertainment show in two years, and proven that it’s not just Game of Thrones and Succession that get the watercooler talk burbling out. Deadpan Diane, portentous Paul, heinous Harry: the deliciously children’s-bookesque characters have got people talking. My partner – a normal adult woman – is a member of multiple Traitors WhatsApp groups, and has gathered with four different collections of friends for watching parties.

But the biggest hit of 2024 so far has been Mr Bates vs The Post Office. An unassuming portrait of Britain’s subpostmasters who were falsely persecuted, and often prosecuted, because of dodgy accounting software, it has rekindled a discussion about the impact of primetime drama. The plight of the posties – who have spent years having their story told, with little cut through – has become a cause célèbre. A petition to strip former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells of her CBE has received 1.2 million signatories at the time of writing (and this month she returned the honour anyway), Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has promised legislation to exonerate the wrongly convicted subpostmasters, and even Fujitsu, the Japanese company responsible for the computer error, has pledged to contribute to a compensation package. This, after a decade of books, podcasts and documentaries had failed to penetrate the imagination of the British public. Some unnamed (but probably handsome) know-nothing reviewers even said that the drama would add little to the scandal’s coverage... which just goes to show what I know.

It is hard to shake the feeling that the power of Mr Bates vs The Post Office was derived from its old-school nature. A primetime weeknight slot on a channel, ITV, that’s beamed to every household in Britain. In Toby Jones, a reliable, recognisable actor for families to cling to. And, most importantly, that sense that, finally, conversations about the subpostmasters were happening all over the country at the same time, rather than broken into fragmented pockets of varied interest, sprinkled over a distended chronology. In the end, it was the very linearity of the conversation that turned the volume up so loud.

The start of this year marks the beginning of a rebellion against the illusion of choice offered by streaming. There is a reason why most Michelin-starred restaurants offer a set menu, or a limited à la carte with suggested wine pairings, rather than an enormous all-you-can-eat buffet. With streaming services struggling to prove themselves financially sustainable, and hit shows being unceremoniously culled, there is a simplicity to tuning into linear channels. Live television is a dog-ear in the book of life, and a reminder that even in the bleakest of war-ravaged years, we’re not alone.