The article discusses how Netflix's "The Watcher" has spurred a significant rise in home security sales, highlighting the ongoing challenges of media literacy as viewers respond to sensationalized narratives without critical analysis.
Remember last December when a high profile "Sex and the City" legacy character showed up in the pilot episode of "And Just Like That," had a heart attack after using a Peloton exercise bike, and then real-life stocks of Peleton plummeted into the ground? Well, that's a thing that happened in case you aren't up to date on all things related to "Sex and the City." The outcry was so loud, "Sex and the City" and "And Just Like That" creator Michael Patrick King had to publicly clear Peloton of all wrongdoing because media literacy is dead.
If today's news regarding Ryan Murphy's new Netflix thriller "The Watcher" is any sign, we're going to be waiting a bit longer for the chance of a media literacy resurrection.
"The Watcher" focuses on a family that moves into the home of their dreams in a New Jersey suburb, only to be terrorized by an anonymous presence who sends them threatening letters family in the hopes it will scare them away. The family soon realizes that their eccentric neighbors are even creepier than they'd anticipated, and paranoia quickly seeps in as they try to figure out who is responsible for the constant harassment. The series is based on a real-life 2018 New York Magazine feature, but the "based on a true story" promise seems to have gotten under the skin of audiences, as sales for security cameras reportedly made a 1000% jump following the series premiere (via Variety).
Of course, this could be a coincidence, but "The Watcher" also apparently generated 125 million viewing hours in its first four days of release, making it difficult not to see the correlation as causation.