A Day Behind

It’s with no small amount of eagerness and curiosity that I await the finale of Lost which is airing in America on the 23rd of May this year. For the past five and a half years, I’ve followed the events that have been happening on and off the island. And in a little over a month from now, the show will end, but I suspect that speculation about some of the inevitable unsolved mysteries will continue long after the credits roll on the final episode.

But as much as I’m looking forward to seeing the finale of Lost, what I’m dreading is the in-between time. It’s that span of time that stretches from when Lost airs in America until the evening of the following day when I’ve done a full day’s work, am able to stream the episode on-line and play catch up with America, hoping the whole time not to accidentally see something posted on line by a friend where they give information about what happened. You can be guaranteed that at least one person will post very publicly something to the effect of “Oh Jack, why did you die?”

This situation isn’t just specific to Lost, though the impending finale has brought that programme to the forefront. It’s a situation that I find myself in with all of my favourite American shows and it happens with comic books too but to a much lesser extent. The day that Ted Mosby announces who The Mother is, I’m going fully internet dark until I can stream the episode.

To be a nerd in Ireland, or indeed anywhere that’s not America, is to live a day behind.

Growing up in Ireland as a nerd was a strange thing. BBC showed re runs of Star Trek and SKY1 showed The Next Generation as well as Quantum Leap if you were really lucky. Thinking back, the shows were probably months or maybe even a year behind the original American airdate, though with no frame of reference at the time it was never a cause for concern. But no one else watched these shows or cared in the slightest that they were on. Eventually I became convinced that the shows were scheduled just for me in a weird kind of nerd solipsism. But then, something big and amazing come along in the form of the world’s biggest double edged sword… the internet.

The internet is an amazing social tool and has allowed the world to connect in ways that were never thought possible before and it showed me very quickly that there were far more people like me out there than I realised. But at times, the best thing about the internet can be the worst thing about the internet because the internet contains all the knowledge in the world.

Knowledge and wisdom are two very different things.

The internet gave everyone a voice and as time goes on, the outlets for that voice become more numerous and easier to access. People love to talk about what they like or in some cases about what they hate. And people really love to talk about what they love or hate almost immediately after they’ve seen it or read it.

But it is the internet that allows us to be only one day behind America and gives us a chance to see our favourite shows before they air on TV on this side of the Atlantic.

The good news is that not all forms of media are subject to delays that are imposed by the world of television. Traditionally, movies come out in America long before they see the light of day in the rest of the world but that too is changing. In recent memory, movies like Taken, Dr Parnassus, Kick-Ass and the recently released Iron Man 2 have seen release dates in Ireland and the UK ahead of America.

The comic book world has always treated us with more dignity though, and we only have to wait one solitary day to “properly” catch up on our American cousins without having to cheat by reading online. New Comic Book Day in America is Wednesday and in Ireland it’s Thursday. This is a fact that most comic professionals in America aren’t actually aware of, but when they do find out it pleases them that their work gets to its audience the entire world over that quickly.

There is still some discrepancy in terms of the prices being charged for the books owing to freight costs and foreign exchange fluctuations. This discrepancy can be overcome though by shopping online, where prices are much more reasonable but the cheaper price comes with an extended timeline. It’s a trade-off that a lot of monthly collectors aren’t willing to make possibly due to the fact that they are afraid of having their enjoyment spoiled by friends in distant lands who have already read the comics, or possibly because it’s not pleasant to have to wait to have a cliff hanger resolved.

Marketers will classify this situation as “cash rich, time poor”, saying that we have the money to spend and don’t have the time to wait. But most of us will readily admit that it’s just down to plain old obsession. Though every once in a while the matter will be taken out of our hands and we’ll be forced to wait longer than normal due to Bank Holiday or an inconvenient ash cloud.

Being a day behind isn’t the worst thing in the world, and like anything else it has it’s good points and it’s bad points. There’s no pressure to have to live to a network-imposed timeline and the fact that you’re going to be behind to a certain degree no matter what you do does give you the freedom to live life on your own schedule. The internet sure ain’t going anywhere and though it can be dangerous during the in-between time, the benefits and the connection to the wider world outweigh any potential drawbacks.

–Simon Fitzgerald

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