Prime time is over. Participation is in
Shared screen experiences are largely a thing of the past, but that doesn't mean shared experiences themselves are gone. Manuela Mesrie, Executive Producer at UNIT9, explains how the collective moment has just shifted medium, and how television can still be a part of it.
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There was a point when prime time meant everything. A fixed hour, a shared screen, a collective gaze. Television was the heart of culture, where stories were told and society gathered to listen.
Today, attention no longer concentrates, it migrates. It moves between feeds, devices and worlds. The collapse of prime time isn’t television’s death, it’s its decentralisation. And what rises in its place is not fragmentation, but participation.
That era of synchronised spectatorship is gone.
That era of synchronised spectatorship is gone. The idea that audiences assemble in front of a single screen at a single moment now feels almost obsolete. What used to be a ritual has become an echo, now replaced by something more fluid, more unpredictable and, perhaps, more alive.
Above: "That era of synchronised spectatorship is gone," says Mesrie, with people no longer gathering around the TV for shared experiences in the way they used to.
From ritual viewing to shared doing
Television once defined a common tempo. Its schedules created a cultural heartbeat: Sunday-night dramas, midweek quiz shows, the film everyone watched together. That kind of rhythm enforced attention and missing an episode meant missing the conversation.
Now, the conversation never stops. Streaming platforms have dissolved appointment viewing, offering infinite access but no shared timing. We no longer ask, 'What’s on tonight?' but rather 'What are we watching?'.
The collective moment hasn’t disappeared, it’s just shifted medium.
The collective moment hasn’t disappeared, it’s just shifted medium. It happens in group chats, in watch parties, in the endless commentary of the scroll. The 'show' is no longer confined to what’s broadcast, it extends into what’s discussed, remixed and relived.
Participation as meaning
My background is in visual art and curation, where spectatorship has always been a space for experimentation. Artists have long challenged the passive viewer, inviting audiences to complete the work, to move, to act, to choose. Today, creative media is finally catching up to that impulse.
When I joined UNIT9, I was thrilled to discover a collective understanding that we’re in a new age of participation, where screens are no longer the destination, but the doorway. And that’s something we continue to explore. Even the Super Bowl — arguably the most sacred mass broadcast of all — is no longer immune to this shift. Once, the commercial break was the main event. Now, viewers instinctively reach for their phones. Attention migrates and, with it, so does the opportunity to engage.
Above: Screens are no longer a destination, but a doorway to somewhere else.
Our team tackled this at the 2025 Super Bowl, turning the commercial break into a game with the Twix Second Screen Staredown. A live augmented reality experience invited viewers to compete on their phones during the break, transforming passive viewing into playful participation. It was a reminder that attention is no longer captive; it’s conversational.
If the 20th century was defined by broadcast, the 21st is defined by dialogue.
What once might have been considered a marketing stunt is now standard practice. These are cultural experiments, provocations that ask what happens when audiences aren’t just watching, but are invited in.
Above: UNIT9's campaign for TWIX Second Screen Staredown.
From broadcast to dialogue
If the 20th century was defined by broadcast, the 21st is defined by dialogue. Media has become a living system, constantly reshaped by its users. That shift doesn’t just change how we distribute work, it changes what kind of work we make. Stories can no longer exist in isolation. They must be designed to travel between screens, formats and communities. They must invite reinterpretation. They must sustain multiple points of entry.
For the launch of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Fanta wanted to continue the narrative beyond the end credits while spotlighting their limited-edition flavours. With the Fanta Beetlejuice Afterlife Train Experience, we built a cinematic universe within a microsite, featuring immersive 3D environments and gamified, interactive content. Activations like this help turn stories into shared, evolving conversations.
A similar ambition drives the Kinder x Stranger Things campaign, which is currently rolling out as a fully immersive 360 experience. Blending digital, experiential and film activations, the work brings fans directly into the Stranger Things universe, continuing the story in playful, unexpected ways. In this sense, television is evolving from a fixed object into an open system. The line between audience and author blurs. Ownership becomes fluid. The story isn’t simply told, it’s shared into being.
Above: Kinder's collaboration with Stranger Things, which is currently rolling out as a fully immersive 360 experience.
Participation, memory and the new collective
There’s something profoundly human in this transformation. We remember what we do more vividly than what we see. When audiences participate — when they interact, play, respond — they forge memory through action. Prime time once created shared memory by synchronising time. Participation creates it by synchronising experience. The new collective doesn’t gather in the living room, it gathers in digital spaces, at different hours, through different gestures, yet still together.
Television may no longer command the room, but it still has power — not as a pillar, but as part of a mosaic.
The beauty of this era is that stories can live longer and deeper. They expand through audiences rather than being confined to a time slot. But that also means creators, like artists, must let go. Participation requires openness, and the acceptance that, once a story enters the world, it no longer belongs solely to its maker.
What we gain when we lose control
The end of prime time is not a loss of grandeur, but a gain in intimacy. Where once we aimed for scale, we now find meaning in connection. Once the screen was a stage, and now it’s a network, a space for co-authorship. This shift asks something new of those who make creative media: to think less about perfection and more about possibility. To design not for a single moment of viewing, but for an evolving ecosystem of engagement and re-invention.
Television may no longer command the room, but it still has power — not as a pillar, but as part of a mosaic. Its future lies not in reclaiming attention, but in cultivating participation. Prime time is over. Participation is in. In that exchange, something remarkable happens; the audience isn’t just watching anymore, they’re shaping the story with us.
