Reality TV

The other day, Saffy said at the rate we’re going, we’ll be discovered five years from now, sitting on our couch, just three puddles of liquefied decomposed mess.

            Amanda looked up from her horoscopes in the current issue of 8DAYS and frowned. “That’s really gross. Why?”
            Saffy’s chest expanded. “Hello, have you not noticed that we’ve not left this flat in two days?”

            Amanda cocked her head. “It’s the weekend. There’s no office to go to!”

            “Yes, but don’t you remember we used to go out during the weekend? We went to parties! We went clubbing. We had dinner. We went to the movies. We went out! Now, we just sit at home all day and watch Netflix!”

            Amanda hesitated. “Yes, but there’s so much to watch!”

            Which I guess is kind of Saffy’s point.

            Ever since Amanda signed up for Netflix and gave us all access to her account, all we’ve done is sit in front of our laptops and binge-watched one show after the other.

            You know how sometimes you’re at a restaurant and you look around and you see a table full of friends or families who are literally not talking to one another because they’re all busy on their phone?

            Well, that’s what’s happening in the little flat I share with Saffy and Amanda. Hours go by without any human interaction. Well, that’s not exactly true. Like yesterday, this happened.

            I was in the armchair. Amanda was on one end of the couch and Saffy on the other. I was deep into episode four of season two of Orphan Black. Have you seen it? It’s a mind-trip, let me tell you. One actress plays, like, ten clones with ten different looks and personalities, and they’re all totally different.

            I knew Amanda was watching The Crown because she’d mentioned it at breakfast five hours ago, but no one really knew what Saffy was watching because she said she had just finished Suits and was about to start something else.

            “God, those guys are cute!” she said, pursing her lips with dissatisfaction at the idea there are cute guys out there whom she’s never going to meet simply because she has the misfortune of being happily attached to the lovely Bradley who kisses the ground she walks on. “I also want to have Jessica’s wardrobe!”

            “Nobody dresses like that in a law office,” Amanda said. “If you’re going to watch fantasy, you should watch Stranger Things!”

            I said I’d just finished that in a marathon eight episode binge.

            Amanda sucked in her breath. “Wasn’t it so good?” she asked.

            “So good,” I confirmed. “That Winona Ryder!”

            Saffy carefully wrote down the name of the show in her phone. “OK, I’ll get onto that as soon as I’ve finished The OA.”

            “Oh? Is that any good?” Amanda asked, shifting in her seat.

            “I have no idea,” Saffy said. “I just started it. It’s a bit weird. Nothing is happening but I keep watching it because they surely can’t have made a show where nothing happens?”

            “Yeah, they can. The first four episodes of Sense8,” Amanda pointed out. “The only reason I kept watching was because the guys are so hot and then suddenly, bam!, they’re all having sex in an alternative dimension! It’s fabulous!”

            Saffy put that down in her phone too.

            And that was literally the end of our interaction for the next five hours. At one stage, I briefly surfaced from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and was conscious of my flatmates shallow breathing, but then I went under again. And when I resurfaced, it was because Saffy let out a long slow moan. “Oh my God, what just happened?”

            Amanda and I hit pause on our screens and looked up.

            Saffy sighed. “I just finished The OA! What the hell just happened? Was any of it real?”

            Which, as it turns out, is one of the unsatisfactory things about three people watching three different shows at the same time. You can never really talk about it. Though, as it turned out, Sharyn had just finished The OA, too.

            “Aiyoh, that OA, ah! So cheem, ah, I tell you! At first, in Russia, then sah-dun-lee in heaven, tok tok so cheem, I get headache!” she said, as she unpacked the da bao dinner she brought over that night.

            “But what do you think happened in the end?” Saffy pressed.

            “Aiyoh, how I know? I now scare to let my chil-ren eat in the school canteen! That last scene - wah lau ay!” 

            My mother says people like us are the reason Trump won.