“Watching With”: Shared Pleasure with Toni B. Heath
As we discover each other online, sometimes we aren’t exactly looking at our friends’ own art, listening to their own music. Instead, we’re getting together with them to look at some third entity.
Or, some of us are. As usual, being nearly 50 years old — or being way too hyper to sit still for much of anything — had left me far out of the loop when it came to the phenomenon of the “watch party,” also known as the “watch-a-thon.” But if you’re coming from my Gen-X frame of reference, you may remember the old discussion boards where you’d watch the next episode of Deep Space Nine or Xena, Warrior Princess and then crank up your dial-up to see what the other fans were saying. It was a brilliant experience, reading their thoughts, keying in your own.
Then came rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5 and the Babylon 5 hardcore got to experience something really new — writer and showrunner Joe Straczynski would drop into the forums, engage with fans, and sometimes share inside stories from the show. About the same time or a little earlier, we had the phenomenon of Mystery Science Theater 3000, where we watched “over the shoulder,” so to speak, as the hosts commented on a B movie of some kind.
“Watching with,” then, has been an important mode of arts consumption for some time. And if you’re looking for someone to watch with in Chattanooga (or heck, from the South Pole), you might try looking up Toni B. Heath. Heath is a media specialist whose credits include producer on Unseen World, a road-trip show focusing on historical, artful, and uncanny locales “in your own back yard.” Recently, they were talked into watching the entire canon of the BBC’s classic Doctor Who, and the result is their Watch-a-Thon of Rassilon.
“We’re going through it, me and my husband, watching all the classic Who, which there is a lot of!” Heath says. “We started from the very first episode. We watch it, and then once we’re done watching, we record our thoughts. We put those out as a podcast.”
Interestingly, Heath and their husband, Joe, met on a forum for Douglas Adams fans.
Heath can’t do actual watchalongs, they say, because they’d get in trouble with the BBC. But they and their husband do create livestreams of themselves watching.
“We count down so everyone can watch it all together,” they say. “We are on the fifth Doctor now.”
The fifth Doctor is actor Peter Davidson’s take on the ever-incarnating space traveler, whose adventures expanded the stories of the Master, the Cybermen, and other recurring Doctor Who characters. There have been thirteen doctors so far (fourteen if you count the War Doctor, though hard-core Whovians are welcome to fact check this and post corrections). Classic Who, running from 1963 through 1989, contains hundreds of episodes. Watching so many episodes might seem daunting to even the fiercest fan, but watching them together adds a new dimension to the experience.
“Once you have access to the Internet, you say, ‘I’m really into this thing, I wonder whether anyone else is,’” Heath says. “You search and you’re like, ‘Oh! Yes! There is so much out there, and people who are interested in the same things are so much easier to find now.”
The Watch-a-Thon can be found on YouTube, which, Heath says, is where most fans leave comments; others find it via Discord or Twitter. It seems odd to devote so many hours to creating content based around other content, but in fact their work is appreciated and understood in a context where fans delight in discussing their favorite shows, in creating art, and in continually adding to the universes they’re devoted to.
“Part of the reason we’re doing this podcast is my husband is a completionist,” Heath says. “He asked, ‘How can I watch the new Who if I haven’t seen everything that came before it?’ This was our compromise. He’d watch the new Who with me if I went back and watched the old Who with him.”
Heath adds that their podcast has inspired other new Doctor Who fans to go back and watch the old Doctor Who episodes. It’s more fun, they’ve told them, if it feels more like a conversation.
Still, “watching-with” via the Internet is far less fun than attending an actual concert or convention or movie together.
“I miss movie theaters right now,” Heath exclaims. “I’m getting nervous about whether or not they come back. There’s an energy to a crowd, especially when you’re all kind of experiencing the same emotions … That shared experience feels good!”
So if you’re like me and you’re pushing “play” on “Welcome to the Hellmouth” (that myth-level first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) for about the 15th time, maybe check online and see who else is watching. You’ll still be watching something alone, but you’ll be together-alone. It’ll be more fun. Promise.
Find the Watch-a-Thon of Rassilon at watchyourrassilon.com.