Are Memes Ruining Television?

is one of the most iconic TV shows of the new millennium. The cast! (Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern... what more could anyone want?) The memes! The sweeping shots of Monterey! When the show returned for its second season earlier this year, it sported a dream cast addition: Meryl Streep. But the three-time Oscar winner's introduction to the California coast was not without controversy. "Meryl Streep is the worst thing about Big Little Lies Season 2. What happened?" asked USA Today's Patrick Ryan. "Meryl Streep Is The Best And Worst Part Of Big Little Lies," argued BuzzFeed 's Alison Willmore.

Much of the reason that Queen Meryl's role was so polarizing boiled down to, well, Twitter. A common complaint among fans suggested that the show's second season geared itself towards social media virality-such as Streep screaming uncontrollably in the opening episode-at the expense of scenes with narrative value. Writer Sirin Kale, for example, noted in The Guardian: "The show has sometimes felt reverse-engineered around social media-friendly, memeable moments."

Big Little Lies is not alone in that regard. Fans accused Game of Thrones writers of reducing Cersei Lannister, played by Lena Heady, to a series of GIFable moments during the hit show's final season. (Seriously, remember her unhinged, out-of-the-blue meltdown about those elephants?) TV critic Scott Bryan tells GQ that this tension is a result of social media being a secondary method of television consumption. "TV producers and makers are becoming very aware that they have so much competition," he says. "So they have to have these big scenes-these big landmark 'moments', which are often very sharable and memeable-to get viral attention."

So why are memes and GIFs suddenly everywhere? Professor Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in 1976 to describe an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. Dr. Richard Clay, Professor of Digital Cultures at Newcastle University-who presented the 2019 BBC documentary How to Go Viral: the Art of the Meme -says memes have always been popular, but the Internet has accelerated and democratized the production process. "For the first time in human history, almost everybody has access to the means of production and dissemination," he says. "We can produce a meme and share it globally. All we need is a smartphone."

Because of how easy it's all gotten to make and share memes (plus how easy it is to watch TV on virtually any device) Matthew Brennan, Television Editor at the LA Times, thinks that TV and meme culture are more closely linked than ever. He is less convinced, though, by the idea that memes and GIFs are influencing the creative process behind shows like Big Little Lies. "I wouldn't go so far as to presume that TV writers are writing shows in order to become memes," he explains. "There might be some broad strokes parameters for what makes a good meme. But predicting what will be memeable is nearly impossible."

Part of the success of memes often depends upon divorcing splashy moments from their original context. "No context" TV Twitter accounts-like " out of context desperate housewives" and " no context the good place "-help remove moments from their original culture roots, giving them new life online. People often tweet snapshots of sad scenes in response to minor, everyday inconveniences, or use more light-hearted moments to make light of (and build detachment from) life's more difficult moments.

Brennan says this is also, in a way, a form of television criticism. "What you're doing when you share a TV meme is you are looking at the original artifact and repurposing it to make a point," he says. "GIFs and memes help to illuminate unexpected connections that TV shows have to the world around us." He uses the popularity of a particular meme from The Good Place, a comedy show starring Kristen Bell and Jameela Jamil, as an example. "In The Good Place there is a moment when Kristen Bell's character says: ' This is the bad place,'" he explains. "This becoming a popular meme tells us that the show is actually a fairly profound philosophical investigation of what it means to be a 'good' person in a 'bad' world."