Watching Dramas at Double Speed: Ruining the Art of Storytelling

We have made entertainment an Olympic race in the magnificent age of streaming. People are now speeding through TV dramas at 1.5x or even heroically 2x the pace to save time and win trending battles. However, double speed doesn’t let you experience the story; it transforms art into a PowerPoint presentation with chipmunk voices.

Pacing is designed by directors like a chef seasoning a dish—pauses for tension, lingering shots on terrified faces, swelling music that hits your emotions. At 2x? Such emotional gut-punches become comedic slaps. Moments of horror are replaced with slapstick sprints, as there are no suspenseful silences anymore. Facial expressions? They pass by so quickly that you fail to notice the terror in the wide eyes and then merely see someone aggressively blinking. You have the idea of the plot but miss the soul.

Yueh et al. say faster speeds make videos sound weird and unnatural, people enjoy it less and experience less impressive emotions. He and Yu say double speed is a spoil to the rhythm and emotional scenes of the story. Basically, you are no longer looking at the art, you are simply running fast in a glitchy video game.

All the streaming giants, such as Netflix and YouTube, contribute to the frenzy by providing endless recommendations and “watch next” traps. We feel pressured by the sense of FOMO to consume faster when the shows are thousands in number pleading to be watched. The 2x speed of podcasts, the 1.75x speed of lectures, warp speed audiobooks, all our brains are now trained to treat everything like a to-do list.

This behaviour is an illustration of a bigger cultural shift in our digital world: everywhere efficiency, nowhere appreciation. We forget how to be slow. We consume stories- dramas, novels, symphonies, as though they were little vitamins, to be swallowed quickly, rather than savored. One of my friends has watched Stranger Things at 2x speed and after that she asked me, “Wait, what’s the Upside Down actually about?” She was aware of the events, like kids on bikes, the monsters, Eleven flipping vans, but missed the creeping dread, the beautiful friendships, the nostalgia of the 80s.

Shows are not so slow, but we are too fast. The elements of immersion are substituted by checklists and storytelling is minimised to the background music that we scroll through to get the next hit. We should pause (at 1x) and think, perhaps, not of the points of the plot here, but of the feel. Be slow and allow the weird to be weird. Both your sanity and your heart will thank you.