In bigger cities in Germany, people, mainly young urban intellectual viewers (yes, the “quality” audience par excellence) will congregate in large bars and viewing halls to watch the newest episode on Sunday nights. The television station ARD is actually providing the episodes pre-original air date, earlier the same day or even further in advance. This is done, so that the episode can be started 15 minutes or so early. The viewing is interrupted before the murder is revealed and the audience begins bargaining, discussing, guessing and betting on who the perp might be, before the episode’s bad guy is revealed, at the same time every other viewer will find out at their home sets.

Clearly, this is an experience of active viewing in a large group, the audience is fully engaged in the murder mystery/police procedural and the noise level, especially during the break (in the one location I’ve witnessed this at) was reminding me of what I read of movie houses in the silent era.
The genre, community, cult status of the show all work together, much like sports, but the target audience is a special one, and the level of ‘brainy’ interaction is also different from sports watching.
In this case then, with the internet and i-phones threatening the home viewing experience, this congregation of viewers, not even fans (many go there irregularly, just for specific detectives etc.) , discusses a text which is stuffed with questions of morality, local character, and German nationality.
In the case of Tatort then, the public viewing turns into a discussion of something rather more complex then who is the better team.

On a different note: I will forever regret not having flown back to Germany during the World Cup in 2006. The country has for a long time been VERY cautious about displaying national pride (for obvious reasons), but I was flooded with e-mails of my friends back home that simply couldn’t believe that they were sitting among thousands of strangers in public viewing arenas and sang the German anthem.

It stands to reason that on the national level in global events, public viewing is a whole other beast, but I believe that experiencing sports, and other media, in a larger group simply resembles what theater, arena, stadium do for their audiences, and that is to create a feeling of belonging, and the exchange of ideas (may they be looking for clues, good foot work, or the better pitch).

The most interesting part to me about watching sports in public is not just the communal, shared experience, but the vocalized and embodied participation of the audience. This is something that sports has traditionally lent itself to more than other cultural forms, but this isn’t a necessary condition. This is why I really like Jeff’s point about news, especially as our political process seems to be more and more like team sports all the time. There seems to be a useful analogy here: while the ‘us vs. them’ mentality of sports is very dangerous in this context, I think, sports in many ways demands participation in ways that might be instructive to our thinking about formal political processes. Also, as participatory media make our engagement with traditional media more dialogic, though (e.g., by live-blogging big events or tweeting about TV, as has been brought up here on Antenna before), does any media consumption become (at least potentially) public?

Perhaps my favorite was going on a Friday night when they would play an ’80s movie, again with the music off and the movie’s soundtrack blasting. I guess the joy came in my thinking it was camp (so, for instance, they might show some completely outrageous movie about break dancing, but shown with a straight face), while I sat in the corner and laughed my ass off. While they too thought it was funny (how could you not?), we were obviously laughing at different things (I am 47-years old, while the other strangers were largely in their early 30s). Big hair, leg warmers, and suppressed gayness can’t help but make everyone smile. There is a particular joy, it seems to me, from communally watching fiction with strangers. Everyone has their own marks of identification, the things they want to share with the person sitting next to them, the desire to make connections with others over a common culture.

It is largely the opposite feeling I have, though, of watching news with others, say in an airport or an auto-repair shop. There my exclamations of disbelief and objection over CNN or Fox’s bullshit make me an outlier, even if the other silent people around me feel the same thing. Professionally, I am more interested in our common citizenship, and what would be more common than watching public life on television with other citizens? With that said, it seems more oppressive and less communal than fictional viewing. There we search for commonality, the joyous, the shared. With news–at least in our current political culture and environment–it reminds me, at least, of how much it sucks to be a liberal. And that is not very fun when Tea Party ragers are enjoying the spotlight.