Spoilers, Narrative Pleasure, and Television

Spoilers have become a noteworthy point of contention for popular media culture, especially for television serials. Across several disciplines, a body of scholarship is emerging around contemporary concerns about spoilers. This article has two main objectives in order to address gaps in this existing research. The first of these is descriptive and is aimed at addressing some fundamental questions. What are spoilers? What do they spoil? The article makes the case that we will benefit from finer-grained conceptualization of spoilers. To this end, this article presents a definition of spoilers before distinguishing two different types: suspense spoilers and surprise spoilers. The second concern of this article is a normative one. Should we care about spoilers? Through analysis of the television series Succession , the article contends that the answer to this may depend in part upon the type of spoiler in question.