It’s the most wonderful time of the year! No, not back to school. Not, not the pumpkining (but, yay!). I am talking about the New TV Season! Buh-bye, reruns, helloooooo new episodes of everything. Sure, I can’t remember how half of my shows ended last season but who cares? My stories are back!

But you guys…we need to talk about social media spoilers, and how everyone freaks out about them.

As you know, I live on the West Coast, where everything airs on TV three hours later than the East Coast. Before 2006 or 2007, this delay wasn’t really a big deal. But then social media became huge, and people started posting about shows as they happened. And ohhhhh man, did this burn me up. I would tweet at people, “That episode of Lost hasn’t even aired on the West Coast yet!” (But you know, in caps lock and with a lot of exclamation points, so they knew I was really angry). Like, thanks for telling me what’s in the hatch, jerks.

Except, who is really at fault here? The people using social media to, you know, be social? Or the dumb-dumb who keeps going on social media three hours before her show airs?

I think we all have to agree that the burden of not being spoiled lies on the person who is, for whatever reason, watching the show later. I can’t (and shouldn’t) prevent people from talking about the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy on Facebook, but I can easily avoid Facebook for a few hours. The night the Mad Men series finale aired, our cable went out, preventing us from watching the episode until the next day. Mike and I had to not only avoid social media, we had to avoid ALL media, since every talk show and news program was discussing the finale. It CAN be done! (I was so productive that day, I passed like 10 levels on Candy Crush).

That being said, those who have seen shows should do their best to not be Spoiler Spoilersons. For example:

~Do not post on someone’s Facebook wall, “OMG let me know when you get to the part in Nashville when Reyna’s car crashes!” Because they will get an email notification about your post and want to punch you.
~Do not text your friend with a selfie of you crying with the caption, “My face when I heard the news about Betty.” Because they haven’t heard the news about Betty yet!
~Do not answer the question, “Did you see last night’s Big Bang Theory?” with, “YES, can you believe it ended with Leonard and Penny DOING THAT SPOILERY THING?” Because a simple Yes or No was all I was going for, Mom.

watching TV
Ready to watch her stories.

Spoiler alert: spoilers are still going to happen, unless you are some kind of magical unicorn who can watch every show live. But let’s all chill about social media spoiling our shows – if you go on Facebook or Twitter before an episode airs, you are knowingly running the risk of exposing yourself to spoilers.

You should also probably avoid talking to my mom.