< How we handle spoilers

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LINDA HOLMES: We've all been there. You're excited about watching something, and you somehow stumble across information you didn't want to have.

STEPHEN THOMPSON: Maybe somebody tells you too much about the twist ending, or they tell you who dies at the end. In other words, you've run into a spoiler. I'm Stephen Thompson.

HOLMES: And I'm Linda Holmes. And today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're talking about how we handle spoilers. Joining us today are our fellow Pop Culture Happy Hour hosts, Glen Weldon-- hello, Glen.

GLEN WELDON: Hey, Vader is Luke's dad. Hey, Linda.

AISHA HARRIS: Gosh.

HOLMES: Oh, geez. And Aisha Harris. Hello, Aisha.

HARRIS: Soylent green is-- wait, does no one know this one?

THOMPSON: No, I know it.

HOLMES: I know it. I know it.

HARRIS: Oh, OK.

HOLMES: I know it.

THOMPSON: We're just averse to spoilers, Aisha.

HARRIS: Oh, my goodness. Whatever. [LAUGHS]

HOLMES: All right, so a couple of things. I don't think there's any one right way to handle spoiler etiquette, so I don't think we're trying to settle on a single set of hard-and-fast rules. There are a lot of different fact patterns where spoilers come up. And when we talk about it in preparing an episode of the show, it's always a case-by-case thing. We talk about each thing individually. We talked a lot behind the scenes about how to cover The Drama, for example. And another peek into the production process, we actually recorded this episode about spoilers before our episodes about The Drama. So if you're wondering why we don't talk about that movie here, that is why. What we want to do today is talk about how we think through questions about spoilers generally-- what is a spoiler, what isn't a spoiler, whether there's a kind of statute of limitations on something that's been out for 10 years or 50 years-- Glen apparently thinks so-- and how to balance how much people like being surprised with how much people like talking about stuff. So, Stephen, I'm going to start with you. I know you have a very particular history with this.

THOMPSON: Yeah, I was raised by anti-spoiler extremists. My parents have believed to the depths of their souls that new people, new viewers, new consumers are born every day. There are newborn babies who do not know the twists in Citizen Kane and, you know, the Star Wars movies. And--

HOLMES: She's mad at Glen right now.

THOMPSON: My mother is writing a sternly-worded letter to Glen Weldon right now. There'll be a family gathering, and my daughter, who loves the Saw movies, will talk about the ending to Saw III. And my mom will be like, da da da da da da. And it's like, Mom, you are 83 years old. You will never sit down and watch all the Saw movies. Why do you care about having the ending of Saw III spoiled for you? So it has been drilled into my head. And, you know, any conversation about spoilers, as we've already seen with our colleague Glen Weldon, any conversation about spoilers is going to include people citing examples of things that are commonly spoiled. And even that is, like, outside the bounds of proper conversation in the household where I grew up.

HOLMES: Yeah.

THOMPSON: So my relationship with spoilers is complicated. And I think a lot of the etiquette around it simply involves kind of warning people upfront. Like, now we are going to talk about the ending of this, and that if you don't do that, that that's sort of unfair to the audience. And in its own way, that just feels like part of providing proper context for the conversation. But it's extremely complicated because we do kind of have a monoculture, you know, when we're talking about this stuff. There is stuff where it's like, do I really need to hold back, you know, some incredibly commonly known twist ending?

HARRIS: Yeah.

THOMPSON: I go back and forth, but this has been beaten into me-- not literally-- from a very, very, very, very early age.

HOLMES: Yeah. Aisha, how about you? Where do you come down?

HARRIS: Yeah, I mean, when we're talking about spoiler, the word itself is inherently-- that means you're ruining an experience, right? Like--

THOMPSON: Right.

HARRIS: --or more specifically, the element of surprise in an experience. And I have a lot of empathy for people like your mom, Stephen, who are very anti-spoiler. You know, I've talked about this a lot on the show, but, like, my personal practice for movies that are coming out is that I try my damnedest to avoid trailers. I want to go in knowing as little as possible. I usually don't even want to really know anything past, like, the logline. If I'm going to be reviewing something or critiquing something, I want to go in feeling as blank slate as possible. Of course, we all bring our own backgrounds, our own expectations and whatnot to a show or to a movie. And so I also feel as though part of what we're talking about here is that experience. And I think about the fact that I did not finally sit down to watch The Sopranos until, mm, five years ago. I knew how it ended--

HOLMES: Yeah.

HARRIS: --because, like, how could you not? By that point, it had been over a decade since the show had ended. And so, to me, I still sat down and enjoyed the show, because first of all, it's a TV show, and I think there is a little bit of a difference between a TV show and a movie--

WELDON: Sure.

HARRIS: --in terms of spoilers, and we can get into that later. But--

THOMPSON: Also, that ending famously doesn't solve anything.

WELDON: Sure, sure.

HARRIS: Yeah, exactly. And so for me, the fun was, how do we get to that point? And so the experience was not ruined for me. I still enjoyed watching the show, even though I knew how it was going to end. And so I think there are caveats, and there's no hard-and-fast rule, but I'm curious to hear everyone else's thoughts as well.

HOLMES: All right. Well, Glen, I know a little bit about your thoughts because you introduced yourself by announcing at least part of your thoughts.

WELDON: Yeah.

HOLMES: So what is up with your desire to blare out spoilers?

WELDON: I would say that's not a spoiler. That is a cultural--

HOLMES: Right.

WELDON: --touchstone. It is not a spoiler. If I had to distill my personal philosophy, it would be that everyone needs to lighten the hell up. I mean, there are spoiler purists out there, like Maggie Thompson, the beloved Maggie Thompson, who wants to know nothing beforehand. That is an extreme position. I think we have to acknowledge that that is an extreme position. So therefore, the onus is on them to do everything they can to avoid spoilers. That means opting out of social media, trailers, everything. That's very hard to do. We live in a society. But their position is a hard-line one. That means it's not gonna be easy. The world isn't structured that way. It's messier. The culture does not exist in tidy little boxes that can be kept shut until you deign to open them. OK, I did reveal the ending of a film, but I do think when we talk about, you know, how we're gonna talk about a film, is it a reveal, or is that the premise? And I tend to err on the side of caution. If it's clearly--

HARRIS: Right, yes.

WELDON: --something that the creator wants people to experience in the moment, I say skip talking about it. We've had plenty of conversations where we go back and forth. It's like, yeah, but that's in the trailer, or they're really promoting that. I would say the trailer and the promotions or the press junket, that's marketing. That's not creating. A lot of creators are at the mercy of studios about what gets into the trailer. There's what the studio wants you to know going in and what the creator does. And, you know, if it's a reveal, if it's a twist, that's a spoiler. So for example, in the film Weapons, I think it's safe to say that, you know, Amy Madigan shows up well into the film. How far she shows up, who she plays, that is best left for folks to discover. That's a reveal. But in the film No Other Choice, the fact that the main character gets fired and sets out to murder other candidates for a job he wants, that isn't a reveal. That is the premise of the movie.

HARRIS: Yeah.

WELDON: That is service journalism, where we set expectations for what kind of film you're in for.

HOLMES: I tend to come down-- if I were distilling my philosophy, it would pretty much be, try not to be a jerk, right? And when I first started talking about television on the internet, a spoiler had a very specific definition, which was something that has not been on yet. So--

HARRIS: Right.

HOLMES: --that was like if you had read something in Entertainment Weekly about something that was going to happen in an upcoming episode, you would talk about it in the spoiler threads. And they were very much held away from other stuff. The good thing about that definition is it means a spoiler is the same thing for everybody.

THOMPSON: Right.

HOLMES: There is one definition of what it is. You can understand what it is. Everybody can understand what it is. The problem with don't be a jerk, the problem with the more kind of empathetic and flexible understanding of spoilers is that it's different for everybody--

HARRIS: Yeah.

HOLMES: --because it is absolutely true that new audiences are born every day. And it's absolutely true that for those people, even something that happened 100 years ago in a movie may be a spoiler, right? But there is also a balancing of interests where people also enjoy talking about things and enjoy having conversations about cultural moments, as Glen said, like a cultural sort of fact and piece of context. And one thing that I find comes up a lot is when you're trying to have a conversation about one movie, and you want to reference how it sort of calls back to--

HARRIS: Yeah.

HOLMES: --or is different from or the same as another, there's value in being able to do that without being completely obsessed with, like, you can't talk about this movie because people might not have seen it. So it's kind of like, I want everybody to have the best possible experience to the best possible extent, but the experience of the person who doesn't want to be spoiled is one thing. The experience of the person who wants to participate in conversations is also an interest that I think deserves to be paid attention to.

THOMPSON: I think there's also a separate conversation that's related to all this, which is coverage of live events, specifically sports, but also, I would say reality TV shows--

HARRIS: Yeah.

THOMPSON: --where sometimes the audience is not necessarily receiving all that information at the exact same time. And--

HARRIS: Right.

THOMPSON: --it is extremely frustrating to me, to the point where I have, like, disabled news alerts on my phone, where if I'm DVR-ing a game or, like, pausing a game, you know, to talk to my family or something and then going back to the game, and then I get a news alert on my phone announcing the outcome of the game, that's extremely irritating. And I would compare that to like a real-world, real-life example where, Linda, I remember you and I used to follow American Idol closely. And I remember NPR kind of posting on its website "American Idol's Winner Revealed," with a picture of the winner of that--

HARRIS: Yeah, yeah.

THOMPSON: --season and my having to frantically reach out to the people running the homepage and say, people on the West Coast have not watched this yet.

HARRIS: Yeah, yeah.

THOMPSON: Like, this has not aired on the West Coast yet. You have just spoiled the outcome.

HARRIS: Right.

HOLMES: Yeah, the whole East Coast, West Coast thing definitely was more of a challenge when more people were watching, you know, linear television when it was on, but certainly some people still do.

THOMPSON: And with sports, they absolutely still do.

HOLMES: Yeah, but everybody watches the game at the same time.

HARRIS: Presumably.

HOLMES: Like, people don't watch the game three hours later.

HARRIS: Some people do. I do know people who do.

THOMPSON: DVRs, pausing to fast-forward through commercials.

HOLMES: Well, no, no, no. I mean, it airs at the same time.

THOMPSON: Right. They're not doing the Super Bowl on time delay on the West Coast. I understand that.

HOLMES: Exactly. Everything, you can decide to DVR and watch it two days later. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about, like, the original airing, right?

THOMPSON: Right.

HOLMES: Which I'm gonna tell you, Stephen, I think with real-world events, a thing that really happened cannot be a spoiler.

WELDON: Yeah.

HOLMES: A thing that has already really happened in the hard world--

THOMPSON: I'm saying, word your news alert to say, "The Super Bowl champion has been revealed. Click through."

HOLMES: No, no, no. That's not a news alert.

HARRIS: I did have down in my notes, while preparing for this, that, like, I do think not sports, but, like, game competition shows are a little different. Like, a show like The Traitors, like, that is something where I don't want to know who was murdered or banished that night. So I'm gonna stay off social media. Like-- and I think that--

THOMPSON: Yes.

HARRIS: --I want to be as careful as possible not to spoil because that's a show that you can presumably hope to, like, catch up with, you know, the same week. But, like, that does affect your enjoyment of the show because it's a show about process. There's a level of suspense involved--

WELDON: Right.

HARRIS: --and watching how these contestants play a game and how it leads to that outcome. Now, one thing I think is interesting is that we also have to realize the spoiler that Glen gave at the beginning, as someone who grew up after the first three movies had already come out, I grew up seeing the "I am your father" thing referenced so many--

WELDON: Yeah.

HARRIS: --different times and remixed.

WELDON: Exactly.

HARRIS: And oftentimes, those twists and reveals, whether it's Psycho, Sixth Sense, "I see dead people," again, that was something that I encountered out in the wild-- "I see dead people"-- over and over. But the thing is, is, like, that's, again, the difference between premise and reveal, right? Because "I see dead people" taken out of context is not in and of itself a spoiler, like, until and unless you are actually watching the movie or read a plot summary. Like, "I see dead people" could mean anything. That doesn't necessarily mean that Bruce Willis is dead, but it does. Sorry-- spoiler. That's what it is. Like, he's dead, but doesn't realize it. And I think that you have to also have to give grace for that because we are a culture where those types of things become part of the language. And so people are gonna encounter it, whether or not they realize it's a spoiler or not. And so I do think I tend to be on Glen's side where, like, I think people tend to be way too precious about these things. And if a movie or show is really, really good, knowing a reveal should not matter.

WELDON: Well, I don't know.

HARRIS: To some extent.

WELDON: Reveals matter, but look, what I tend to avoid when writing reviews and we're doing the show is plot summary, because some readers, some listeners think they want it. Nobody does. What matters is not what happens, but how it happens.

HARRIS: Right.

WELDON: And so our job is to describe and delineate and place in context the style, the technique, the approach. I try to describe the creator's take on the material. That's what matters. I was editing a movie review a few years back, and I realized I-- you know, I like this writer, but I was, like, six paragraphs in, and I got nothing but plot summary. And then I realized, you know what? That's my bad because I assigned them to write a review about a film that I knew kind of wasn't their thing. So they default to summarizing what happens. And if they don't have a take on, you know, the creator's take, if they don't respect the creator's take or they don't respect the premise or the whole endeavor, then they're just going to give me the six paragraphs of Wikipedia of what happens in it. And so it becomes, you know, Bolivia, in conclusion, is a land of contrasts. And it's just book report approach.

THOMPSON: Right.

WELDON: That's a pet peeve of mine in reviews that I try to avoid it. When I'm writing one, I edit it out-- or reviews that I edit, because I think it's not about plot. It's about the approach to the plot. It's about the approach to the material.

HOLMES: Yeah, I agree with you. I do think there are some films and shows-- I think about it more with movies, but I think there are some projects where the obligation to hold on to something that is a reveal-- right? So I would not give it away in a review--

WELDON: Right.

HOLMES: --right? Or I would not want to-- is a real challenge for your ability to get into the important, creative stuff about the film and about the story. The most recent example I ran into was The Life of Chuck, a movie that, you know, a lot of people didn't like. I really liked. It's based on a Stephen King story, and it has a structure that's very confusing at the beginning. And eventually, it sort of all comes together in what I think is a really interesting and humane kind of way. But if you talk about that, you kind of ruin the way it's all supposed to kind of come together.

THOMPSON: Right.

HOLMES: I found it extremely challenging to talk about that film in a way that conveyed the reasons why I liked it without giving away too much of that. And I think there are certain things like-- you know, I haven't seen The Housemaid, but this is something I've seen about The Housemaid. People sort of say, if I don't tell you anything about what happens, I can't really explain, like, what I liked about the movie.

HARRIS: Yeah, yeah.

HOLMES: And therefore, that's already been spoiled for me because I bumped into it, and, you know, I also will say, so much stuff gets spoiled for me.

WELDON: Yeah.

HOLMES: I mean, sometimes I will spoil things for myself.

THOMPSON: Sure.

HOLMES: I'm one of many people-- this is a cliché by now, pretty much. I am one of many people who spoils horror movies for myself, using--

WELDON: Yeah.

HOLMES: --Wikipedia summaries, just so that I know--

WELDON: Right.

HOLMES: --what I'm in for. Not a new one, not a new one that I'm reviewing or excited about or whatever. But if I'm going to watch one, sometimes I'm just gonna be like, OK, what exactly am I--

THOMPSON: My partner painstakingly pours over parents' guides--

WELDON: Oh.

THOMPSON: --to find out where the upsetting parts are so she can avoid them.

HARRIS: Yes.

WELDON: Yeah, and if I'm watching a horror movie at home and it's not holding my interest, I will be on the Wikipedia page prepping myself for what's coming-- not reading the whole thing, but I'm, like, always one sentence ahead of what's happening on screen. It's always bad. It's never satisfying. I hate it, but I do it because I'm a chicken.

HOLMES: Aw.

THOMPSON: You know where I've done that? I've done that with historical dramas.

HARRIS: Oh, well, yes.

THOMPSON: I feel like-- like, it's not a spoiler. I just needed to be informed about this historical event. And sometimes I'll go through and be like, I just want to know whether this person dies.

HOLMES: I just want to know how things turn out for Abraham Lincoln.

THOMPSON: [LAUGHS]

HOLMES: Yes.

HARRIS: [LAUGHS]

HOLMES: I guess my question for you all is, like, when movies or TV shows are based on a book, like, how do we talk about spoilers then? And I know, you know, sometimes, when we've talked about those types of movies and TV shows, we might say, if you've read the book, it's pretty close to the book. Like, it's pretty-- you know. Is that a spoiler? I don't know if that is, especially if it's, like, a murder mystery or that sort of thing.

THOMPSON: I think sometimes just-- there are ways to sort of talk about these things that are vague enough, that they're not actually ruining people's fun. But it might be useful in a conversation about a movie that's just come out to say, there is a massive deviation from the book that I found really distracting as somebody who loved the book. Or I think there are ways you can kind of talk around it, where you are acknowledging the existence of a twist or the existence of a divergence from source material in ways that are not spoiling people's fun but setting them up and kind of giving them a sense of whether they should check something out.

HARRIS: Yeah.

HOLMES: Yeah, that's true. But I think, as I said originally, my philosophy very much comes down to try not to be a jerk--

THOMPSON: Sure.

HOLMES: --which means even if you're talking about Citizen Kane or The Empire Strikes Back or The Sixth Sense, I'm still not gonna say what the thing is if I don't need to, because sometimes people sort of wield spoilers as kind of, like, as an act of aggression. And I don't go out of my way to spoil things for people because I don't know why you would do that. I don't know what the value is of that. In the context of a conversation, yes, absolutely. I'm sort of like, well, this came out 30 years ago, whatever.

HARRIS: Yeah.

HOLMES: But I'm not gonna be like, hey, have you ever seen this movie? And did you know that what happens at the end is X? Like, why would I do that?

WELDON: Yes, but in the conversation about spoilers and what constitutes a spoiler, this notion of we live in a society, a society that is built, in some small part, on references to classic texts and films and shows and music and books. And it's in the ether, and we can't pretend it isn't. And yeah, I wouldn't go out of my way to, like, start a conversation with somebody at a bar with the thing I said at the beginning of the show. But here, we are talking about the nature of spoilers. I felt perfectly comfortable getting meta here.

HARRIS: Oh, I don't think anyone's coming for you, Glen. Don't worry.

THOMPSON: Except for my mother.

HOLMES: Stephen's mother is.

HARRIS: The thing is, is, like, my favorite way of talking about movies is to be able to talk about it without having to dance around things. And so what I do appreciate that we've done sometimes here on this show is we've done spoiler specials--

WELDON: Right.

HARRIS: --or we'll break up the conversation and we'll warn people. Because--

THOMPSON: After the break, we're gonna talk about--

HARRIS: Exactly, because, honestly, sometimes, you cannot talk about a movie or about--

HOLMES: Yeah.

HARRIS: --why we didn't or did like a movie without talking about something that does constitute a major sort of shift in the narrative or a turning point or something that just completely rearranges everything that came before it.

HOLMES: Yeah.

HARRIS: And, you know, I think that's also the difference between a review and a critique, right, is that a review, our job is to-- you know, yes, we have to have plots, summary to some extent. And there's ways to do it, and we can be specific, but we can never be too specific. When we're critiquing something or when we're doing something that's more informed after people have hopefully seen the movie, that is when we are able, or at least I myself-- I'm speaking for myself. But like, I feel more free and able to really dig into things more deeply. And I think there's value in both things for people who are seeking out thoughts on something that they either plan to see or have already seen.

HOLMES: Yeah, I think that all makes sense. And I think, as I said at the beginning, there's no strict one rule. There's no one right way. You just kind of have to feel your way through it. And I think what you can tell from this conversation is that we all feel our way through it, too. All right. That brings us to the end of our show. Aisha Harris, Glen Weldon, Stephen Thompson, thanks so much for being here to talk about spoilers.

WELDON: Thank you.

THOMPSON: Thank you.

HARRIS: Thank you.

HOLMES: This episode was produced by Carly Rubin, Kayla Lattimore, and Mike Katzif and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes. And we'll see you all next time.

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