Rewatching with the Gilmore Guys: Rewatch Podcasts and Residual Consumption

Abstract

This article considers Gilmore Guys to be an urtext of rewatch podcasts and uses fan survey responses to situate rewatch podcasts within a set of emerging consumption practices and industrial conditions that blur the lines between television and podcasting, old and new media, and network-era and post-network-era consumption practices. I expand upon Rebecca Williams’s notion of post-object fandom by suggesting that these podcasts restore the ontological security brought about by the absence of the original show. Throughout, I attempt to untangle certain gendered discourses and antagonisms that inevitably emerge in a podcast about men watching a show originally marketed to women, and I suggest that residual modes of consumption can often be entangled with and reproduce gendered assumptions about audience engagement.