Let’s Talk About What We Want to Talk About

According to my mother, there are two foolproof ways to have a boring conversation. One: begin a chat by asking a friend whether he or she would like to hear about the dream you had last night. Two: recap an episode of television.

It’s not that my mother doesn’t appreciate a good story. She loves them — novels, New Yorker articles, Joni Mitchell songs. But the standard television episode is a lazy medium. It’s formulaic. And while it works on screen, even I — an indefatigable conversationalist — have to admit that the best of great television can get lost in translation. I shed real tears when Seth Cohen introduced Ryan Atwood to the Bennifer of holidays on an early episode of the O.C. And yet, “The Best Chrismukkah Ever” would never be so spiritually uplifting in subsequent analysis with my best friend as it was when I watched it at 8 p.m. on a Thursday night.

For all the viral chatter that television generates on Twitter and in elaborate “think pieces” and on this website, where Leandra and I read so much into each episode of Girls that I have started to parse hairstyles for indications of character development, it turns out that my mother is not alone in her assertion that even the most beloved TV series make for lukewarm banter.

Over at New York Magazine’s Vulture, Daniel Engber contested that “Your TV Small-Talk Is Ruining Dinner Parties.” Recounting a particularly banal instance of the social crime, Engber surmises: “this conversation isn’t good at all. It’s weird and sad and dull.”

While Engber concedes that television itself is as “amazing!” and “SO GOOD” as we celebrate it to be, our discussions about it are more repetitive than Room Raiders. “We don’t need this in our lives,” Engber concludes. “If our TV talk were on the DVR, we’d delete it.”

I understand what he means. And yet I’m not so sure I buy it. For me and for my friends, conversations are genuine and unique social experiences. They are not pale imitations of some “real thing.” It sounds dramatic, but I mean it: Our group exultations in The Mindy Project and Orange is the New Black are how my friends and I stay in touch and connected. We tune in, and we talk about it, and, for a few minutes, our lives seem close together. Isn’t that what great conversation is? A tool of communication that lets us make some sense of each other? Would it be better for us to gossip about our roommates? Is it delusional to gossip about Olivia Pope? Real talk: Can she be my friend?

What counts as good conversation in the era of sound bites and animal GIFs and @kingbentleythebulldog? Should we talk more about books? Or boys? Or beauty treatments? Should we expound on politics or super foods or the weather? Should we just pour ourselves another drink and exchange synopses of our favorite episodes of Sex and the City? No? Okay! Anyway! Tell me: What do we even want to talk about anymore? And what kind of conversation holds your interest at mealtime?