Meaning
The practice of following a television show, film, or video that you dislike on purpose, taking entertainment from mocking its flaws rather than from the story itself. Informal register; the tone is usually ironic affection rather than genuine hostility. Informal and ironic; it signals affectionate contempt for the show, not real animosity toward its makers. Regional use: General English; strongest in television and online fandom talk.
Origin
Mocking bad entertainment is old: the BBC notes that audiences flocked to Florence Foster Jenkins's famously bad singing from the 1920s to the 1940s, and Wikipedia traces online snark communities to Television Without Pity in 1998. The word itself belongs to the early 2010s: New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum is widely credited with coining, or at least popularising, the term in her April 2012 piece about the Broadway drama Smash, in which she admitted enjoying a show she loathed. Entertainment Weekly ran a piece titled The Rise of Hate-Watching in August 2012, and Slate closed that year by calling it a word of the year. Academics study the behaviour as anti-fandom, notably Jonathan Gray in 2005 and Cohen and colleagues in 2021.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- hate-listening
- hate-reading
- hate-watch (verb or noun)
- hate-watcher
Usage Examples
- I keep hate-watching that courtroom drama just to complain about the writing.
- Their whole friend group hate-watches the talent show together on Monday nights.
- She calls it a hate-watch, but she has not missed an episode in three seasons.