Sharing the love is harder than creating some hate

Rob Long is torn between friendship and the reality of a show that didn't go wrong.

Hate is out in Hollywood, writes Rob Long. Reed Saxon / AP

I got a text message from a friend last week. He was inviting me to come watch a television show at his place with a group of other writers. The message, at first, was baffling: “Want 2 H8 watch a show?”

I had no idea, at first, how exactly to parse that message. What did it mean, I wondered, to “H8 watch” something?

“Dude,” my friend said when I did the old-fashioned, hopelessly geriatric thing and called him up, person to person, to ask, “you’ve never heard of ‘hate watching’ a show?”

“Hate watching,” he explained, was when you gather a bunch of friends together in a party-like setting – you know: snacks, drinks, comfortable cushions – and you all watch something you know is going to be truly terrible. The fun of it, he assured me, was the constant snarky comments and steady stream of catcalls from the assembled guests.

“It’s so much more fun than watching something good,” he promised me. “When it’s good you have to be polite and pay attention and behave yourself. When it’s bad you get to shout back at the screen, make fun of the actors, and laugh at the general badness of the product.”

My friend, though, is a television writer, like me. And the guest list for the event, he told me, consisted entirely of our fellow scribes. The show we were invited to “hate watch” was the premiere episode of a new TV comedy – a show that, to my knowledge, hadn’t yet been seen.

“Oh, I’ve seen it,” my friend said. “I had a show in contention for the fall season at the same network. And they chose that one over mine. And let me tell you, it’s terrible. Truly awful. So I thought, why not have some fun, get some people over and watch the show together?”

This isn’t the most emotionally healthy way to deal with career setbacks and marketplace competition, to be sure. But on the other hand, it seemed basically harmless. My friend’s way of getting revenge on the other project – and, by extension, the other writer – was at least private, contained and didn’t involve slashing car tyres or calling in bomb threats. And both of those have been known to happen.

Also, I had never been to a “hate watching” party before, and I was curious. Did we all have to take turns attacking the show? Were we required to dress a certain way? Were certain snacks more appropriate – something spicy, say – than others? So on the appointed night and time I showed up at my friend’s house ready to hate the show that had beat his show out for a spot on the fall schedule. I came armed with caustic and nasty cracks about the dialogue, the characters and the age of the lead actress.

What I wasn’t prepared for, unfortunately, was to like it. The show I was invited to despise I actually enjoyed. It wasn’t perfect, of course – nothing is, except whatever it is that I’m working on at the moment – but it was funny and fresh and had an interesting point of view. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

It became awkwardly obvious – around the time that my friend had shouted his tenth insult at the screen, unaccompanied by encouragement from his guests – that the other writers felt the same way. We had come expecting to hate. We had instead discovered that we loved.

By the end of the “hate watching” party, it was obvious to everyone – including, tragically, my friend – that the show we had just watched was funny, smart, sophisticated and a hit. Halfway through, even he stopped trying to find things about it to hate and surrendered to its witty dialogue and fresh characters.

It was, in other words, a terrible “hate watching” party. Instead, it was an ego-deflating experience for my friend, where he was forced to confront the truth that he was not robbed of a spot on the fall schedule, that the show that won a place on the air was not inferior to his.

As we all shuffled off, embarrassed, into the night, we tried to make it up to our friend.

“It’s not that great a show,” we said.

“There were some moments that didn’t work,” we said.

Later that night, feeling guilty about enjoying the show so much, I texted my friend: “Still think ur show had lots of gr8 qualities!”

“Name 1,” was the reply

But I couldn’t think of one offhand. So when the phone rang, I knew it was my friend, calling to ask how exactly his show was better than the one we were all supposed to have “hate watched”. I let his call go to voicemail. It’s easier to “hate watch” than to “love watch”.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl