Audience engagement with a television show’s story is often determined by the quality of the show itself. With new modern media from large streaming platforms, however, viewers have begun to observe a decline in writing quality, leading to the newest phenomenon: second-screen writing.
According to BBC, second-screen writing is an approach created by cinema writers to make their writing easier to follow for viewers, especially audience members who could be dividing their attention to multiple things. Junior Remi Fusilero reflected on her attention span, present distractions and how much she is able to focus on a television show alone.
“Probably about 50% of the TV shows or movies that I watch, I’m usually on my phone, but then also trying to watch at the same time,” Fusilero said.
Math teacher Taylor Burk highlighted her inability to concentrate on two different tasks but recognized others can.
“I’m not great at dealing with two inputs at the same time, so if I’m on my phone doing whatever, I don’t know what’s going on in the show. I have to rewind it,” Burk said. “My husband is different. He’ll be able to chime in and comment on the show while he’s reading articles, reading the news, scrolling, whatever he’s doing.”
Junior Elijah Press, however, learned from his psychology class that multitasking is not what people often think it is.
“You can’t actually focus on two things at once. You’re just quickly switching between two of them,” Press said. “If you’re watching TikTok while watching a TV show, you’re constantly switching between paying attention to the TikTok and paying attention to the TV show.”
Fusilero believes the rise and accessibility in technology is the reason cinematic writing has devolved into second-screen writing.
“In recent 20 years with the boom of cell phones, there’s a lot more distractions that are available for everybody, so it’s more likely that these people (the screen writers) are going to want to appeal to the audience,” Fusilero said.
Agreeing with Fusilero, Press added that phones and second-screen writing are reciprocal.
“I think phones are the cause and then the effect is second-screen writing,” Press said. “But then I think second-screen writing perpetuates it, so it’s like a perpetual feedback cycle, a loop of worse writing and better phones and less attention span.”
Like others, senior Sean Sawaya shared that he will revert to another device when he finds the show less engaging.
“I think it’s not just because the movies are always bad. I think people are addicted to their phones now,” Sawaya said. “There’s a show that I watch with my parents. Some of the time I just go on my phone and I scroll. It’s not that I don’t like the show completely. It’s just that I’d rather be on my phone.”
Heavy use of other devices while watching TV shows has led to viewers relying on audio and dialogue alone to understand what is going on in specific scenes. Burk noticed the lack of attention given to visuals, which writers spend time perfecting.
“If I’m just listening to the show, I feel bad for the cinematographers and directors and people who spend a lot of time – and editors – making shows look beautiful or well-shot or well-lit,” Burk said. “If I’m not looking at the screen, I’m probably missing out on a lot of people’s areas of expertise, right? Special effects, people, anything that’s visual. You’re not seeing it.”
Like Burk, Press recognized the lack of attention viewers have to the visual scenes, leading to an emphasized dependence on sounds from the show. He believes this could lead to the actual structure of the story becoming substandard due to the writer’s initiative to dumb down their writing.
“I think by changing the writing to be more easily digested while you’re doing something else on your phone probably makes it so big declarations are simpler, so that they can easily be remembered while you’re doing something else, which will just make writing worse in general,” Press said.
Reflecting on the evolving nature of television and the media, Fusilaro believes audiences will drive the change seen on screens.
“I think the writing itself is a correlation to what the people want and how the people have been acting around the media,” Fusilero said. “Things are just so instant now. So the rate at which I guess the media is moving is and what the people want is the way I think TV is going to continue to progress.”