Last week was the premiere of Sharknado 2: The Second One, the
much-anticipated sequel to last summer’s campy hit TV movie Sharknado about a freak tornado sucking
sharks out of the ocean and dropping them like kamikazes into Los Angeles. For
those who found the popularity of both Syfy channel schlockfests to be a sign
of the impending collapse of Western civilization, Brian Moylan at The Guardian
poses
an unsettling scenario: Sharknado is
the future of television, and “we all better get used to it.”
Curiously, considering what a cult
favorite it has become, Sharknado’s
2013 premiere was seen
by even fewer viewers than is typical of a Syfy original movie, which usually
consists of mega-creatures of one sort or another wreaking havoc or battling each
other. But the movie’s popularity quickly developed as a trend on Twitter,
so when Syfy aired another showing a
week later, its viewership increased by 38%. A third airing a week after that
garnered even more viewers and set a record for the most-watched original
film encore in the network’s history, and so a sequel was born.
Sharknado
2: The Second One, what Brian Moylan calls “the schlocktacular sequal [sic]
to the social media phenomenon” of its predecessor, has “an utter pop culture
craziness that has fans snickering all the way to heaven with non-stop action
and a plot that only makes a whiff of sense.” With a hyper-awareness of its own
ridiculousness, the movie almost constantly winks at the audience; for example,
it features prominent cameos by former pop culture stars (MTV’s Downtown Julie
Brown, Miley Cyrus’s achy breaky dad Billy Ray, and Taxi’s Judd Hirsch, here playing a taxi driver) and current pop
culture figures like Perez Hilton, Jared the Subway guy, and Kelly Osbourne. It
is all designed to get viewers reacting on social media.
And it worked. Not only did this
sequel become the channel’s most
watched original movie ever, at one point it held all top 10 trending topics in the United States. There were more
mentions of the sequel on Twitter than #MileyCyrus on the day of MTV’s 2013
VMAs, #kimye on Kim and Kanye’s wedding day and #transformers4, #thelegomovie,
#godzillamovie and #22jumpstreet on each of those movies worldwide premiere days.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch declared
it “the most social movie on TV ever,” more so than any episode of Game of Thrones, The Bachelorette or Survivor.
And therein lies its significance
for the future of TV entertainment, according to Moylan: it’s enormously
popular “not because it’s any good or anyone really likes it,” as he points out,
“but because people will watch it live, along with all the commercials, to have
the privilege of snarking about it in real time on their handheld device or
laptop.”
Moylan notes that it is so much
easier to get a 140-character rise out of people over bad TV like Sharknado than it is to ruminate at
length about something of superior quality like Mad Men. “Just look at Scandal,”
he writes. “It’s ridden people OMG-ing about presidential assassination
attempts all the way to being one of TV’s biggest dramas.” I’m not sure Scandal proves his point; the same thing
could be said of people OMG-ing on Twitter over which major characters get
killed off each week on Game of Thrones,
but neither show is of poor quality, much less Sharknado-caliber poor.
Yes, people enjoy the interactivity
of tweeting about bad (and good) TV, just as they enjoy the interactivity of
video games or voting for an American
Idol; but is Sharknado really what
television’s future looks like? I think not. Social media certainly help drive
the success of a TV series or movie, but what people prefer even more than the
social interactivity is variety. That has been the lesson of cable TV success.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 8/8/14)
