I have watched Emily in Paris twice. Not because I think it’s good—I think it’s a lavender-scented hand grenade lobbed at anyone who has ever visited France. I watched it because something in my brain needs to yell at Lily Collins’s beret collection. And I’m not alone. Every Monday, a quiet army logs into their streaming service of choice, loads a show they despise, and settles in for an hour of furious note-taking. We are the hate-watchers. And honestly? We might be the only ones paying attention.

The Anti-Fan Is Still a Fan

Let’s get the obvious objection out of the way: if you hate something, why watch it? The question sounds reasonable until you apply it to literally any other human activity. Why eat an entire bag of flaming-hot chips when you know your stomach will stage a revolt? Why read the comments? Why call your ex? Humans are drawn to friction. We like things that resist us.

Hate-watching—defined loosely as consuming media specifically because you find it objectionable, absurd, or maddening—has been around since people first gathered to throw tomatoes at bad theater. But the streaming era has formalized it. We don’t just stumble into bad shows anymore; we seek them out with intention. We make spreadsheets. We coordinate group texts. We build rituals around our contempt.

And that ritual is a form of engagement that the cultural establishment refuses to take seriously because it doesn’t look like reverence. But reverence is boring. Reverence tells you nothing. Hatred—specifically, the kind of hatred that makes you watch every season of a show you claim to despise—tells you everything.

What Your Hate-Watching Habit Says About You

Hate-watching is diagnostic. It reveals what you care about by showing you what violates your expectations. When I sit through an entire season of a prestige drama I find insufferable, I’m not wasting time—I’m mapping the borders of my own aesthetic values. Every groan, every eye-roll, every text message that reads “I cannot believe this character said that” is data.

Consider the phenomenon of The Bachelor. Millions of people watch it weekly while loudly declaring it trash. They’re not wrong—it is trash. But those same viewers can tell you the structural differences between seasons. They can identify production manipulation. They can articulate exactly why one season’s lead was worse than another’s. They’ve developed a critical vocabulary around a show they supposedly don’t respect.

That’s not passive consumption. That’s forensic engagement. The hate-watcher is the truest critic because they have no incentive to perform appreciation. They’re not angling for a quote on a book jacket or a studio relationship. They’re watching because they cannot look away from the car crash, and in the process, they’re noticing every dent.

The Hierarchy of Watching

We like to imagine a clean spectrum: good taste on one end, garbage on the other. But media consumption doesn’t work that way. Here’s what I propose instead:

• Passive watching: You’re half-present. The show is background noise. You couldn’t summarize last week’s episode.
• Appreciative watching: You like it. You pay attention. You maybe recommend it to a friend.
• Academic watching: You’re studying it. You take notes. You’re probably writing an essay.
• Hate-watching: You’re furious. You’re paying more attention than anyone in the other three categories. You will remember specific lines of dialogue years from now.

That last one is the killer. Hate embeds information. Anyone who watched True Blood through its final, disastrous season can still quote dialogue from it. Meanwhile, the perfectly pleasant procedural you watched last Tuesday? Gone. Evaporated. Your brain didn’t need to store it because nothing in it provoked a response.

The Economics of Outrage

Networks and streamers have figured this out, of course. They just don’t have the decency to admit it. When a show trends on Twitter because everyone is mocking it, the platform doesn’t distinguish between love and hate. A view is a view. A trending topic is a trending topic. This is why we get shows that seem almost designed to be hate-watched—they’re engineered to provoke the specific kind of outrage that generates memes, group chats, and think pieces.

But here’s where I diverge from the usual hand-wringing about outrage cycles. The complaint is always that we’re being manipulated, that our hate is just free labor for content mills. And sure, sometimes it is. But the assumption that hate-watchers are dupes strips them of agency. When I choose to watch something I expect to hate, I’m not being tricked. I’m making a calculated decision to engage with cultural material on my own terms. I know exactly what I’m doing.

The academic term for this kind of engagement is anti-fandom, and scholars like Jonathan Gray have written about it extensively. Anti-fans don’t just dislike media—they develop dense, detailed relationships with it. They create counter-narratives. They build communities around shared disdain. They produce an enormous volume of secondary cultural material: memes, parody accounts, video essays dissecting exactly why something fails.

In other words, hate-watchers are doing the same work as fans. They’re just doing it with more spite and, often, more precision.

Why Sincerity Is Overrated

There’s a persistent belief that authentic cultural engagement means sincere appreciation. If you don’t love something, you’re not really engaging with it. This is nonsense. Sincerity is the easiest thing to fake. I can tell you I loved a film and mean nothing by it. But if I spend six hours hate-watching a show and then another hour writing a 2,000-word email to my friend about why the third season’s timeline makes no sense, that’s engagement. That’s care. Twisted, maybe. But care nonetheless.

The cultural establishment—by which I mean the people who write grant-funded essays about the importance of public television—treats hate-watching as a pathology. Something to be cured. They want us to watch things “mindfully” or “with intention.” As if sitting through a thoughtful documentary you immediately forget is more intentional than rage-watching four hours of a reality show you can critique on seventeen different axes.

Hate-watching is honest because it doesn’t require you to perform enjoyment. You don’t have to pretend the weak script is “intentionally stylized.” You don’t have to find depth where there is none. You can sit with your discomfort, your boredom, your contempt, and let those responses teach you something about what you actually value.

The Case for Taking Guilty Pleasures Seriously

I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. I believe in pleasures that the culture has trained you to feel guilty about. The guilt isn’t personal—it’s political. It’s the result of a class system that says some art is worth your time and some isn’t, and that your consumption habits determine your worth as a person.

But the things we hate-watch tell us more about our values than the things we sincerely admire. Nobody hate-watches something that doesn’t touch a nerve. You don’t hate-watch a show that leaves you indifferent; you just don’t watch it. The hate implies a stake. Something in that show is failing to deliver on a promise you cared about, or succeeding at something you find threatening, or revealing a truth you’d rather not confront.

So the next time someone catches you watching something you claim to hate, don’t be embarrassed. You’re not wasting time. You’re conducting field research. You’re mapping the boundaries of your own taste. You’re engaging with culture in the most honest way possible—by refusing to pretend you don’t care.

FAQ

Isn’t hate-watching just feeding engagement metrics to bad content?

Yes, technically. But the alternative—only consuming things you approve of—creates a sanitized cultural diet that teaches you nothing. Engagement metrics are a blunt instrument; they can’t distinguish between love and hate. What matters is what you do with your experience. If your hate-watching leads to better criticism, sharper conversations, and a deeper understanding of why certain stories fail, then the view count is beside the point.

How is hate-watching different from just being a hater?

A hater complains without watching. A hate-watcher complains because they watched—closely, repeatedly, with attention to detail. The hater says “this show is bad” and moves on. The hate-watcher says “this show is bad, and I can prove it using evidence from episodes four through nine, and also the lighting in season two was doing something interesting before the writers abandoned it entirely.” One is dismissive; the other is obsessive. Obsession, even negative obsession, produces insight.

Can you hate-watch respectfully?

This depends on what you mean by respectfully. If you mean: can you engage with something you dislike without attacking the real people involved? Then yes, absolutely. Hate-watching goes wrong when it becomes harassment. But disliking someone’s creative work—and being vocal about it—is not the same as targeting them personally. The best hate-watchers I know reserve their sharpest criticism for the work itself, and they can articulate exactly where and why it fails. That’s not disrespect. That’s criticism at its most engaged.