Have you ever watched The Summer I Turned Pretty? What about Love Hypothesis? Have you ever sat through all five of the Twilight movies or watched the three Maze Runner in one sitting (okay, I’ll admit the first movie is actually pretty good)? While these beloved IPs have their respective fanbases, they also have their respective hate-watchers, a community of people who swear they don’t like the show but keep watching because they enjoy mocking and criticizing it instead.

Now I know what you are thinking: “If you don’t like the show and you continue to watch it, doesn’t that mean you like it just a bit?” I get where this concern is coming from. When it’s 2 a.m. and you realize you’ve been watching three back-to-back episodes of Emily in Paris, it’s hard to tell if you are still hate watching at that point. But, as a professional hate-watcher who has hit this wall many a time, I’m here to teach you what you need to know in order to hate watch correctly.

So sit up (I know you’re slouching) and listen. You may have midterms, but this is one class you cannot skip: How To: Be a Professional Hate-Watcher, coming to a theater near you in Spring 2027.

1. Do your research beforehand.

In order to be up-to-date on the worst that Netflix, HBO, and Hulu have to offer, you must first go straight to the source aka go on an internet deep dive. Entering a movie blind without searching for a review on YouTube or reading the comments on Letterboxd may run the risk of you actually enjoying it (oh, the horror!). Look for the 1-star or highly polarizing reviews; search the ratings on IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes for purely rotten content (ba dum tss). If you are one of the classy few amongst the hate-watching group, you will probably think to look for reviews in The New York Times or other well-known publications. For beginners, I recommend just making your Letterboxd account first and watching what little love of movies you have slowly leave your body with every bad review you read.

2. Find your hate-watching niche.

Now this is the most fun you’ll have outside of mocking the movie or TV show. Find what type of genre you truly think is ripe with bad content and go forth! You could be into B-movie horror films with really bad acting, teen dramas with scripts written exclusively by ChatGPT, or (my personal favorite) 2000s - 2010s superhero movies (cough cough, any of the D.C. movies). Go ahead, watch Catwoman (2003) or Suicide Squad (2016), and you’ll certainly wish you hadn’t. Just don’t come back crying and say you weren’t warned…

3. Force your friends to watch with you.

This might be a little evil on your part, sure, but their reactions are bound to be so funny that I don’t care. Just please, please DO NOT tell them anything about the show’s plot. As a matter of fact, don’t even tell them the show’s title! Just put it on when they least expect it and watch the horror unfold on their face as they wonder what in the world they did to you to be subjected to such torture. Maybe you’ll even make a new hate-watcher of your friends — who knows! The more the merrier, am I right?

4. Up first on the hate-watching chopping block.

Any reboot that’s come out in this decade: I’m talking about Gossip Girl (2021), Pretty Little Liars (2022), And Just Like That (2021), the Harry Potter series that’s coming out later this year, a lot of the stuff Adam Sandler makes (not all of it is bad, but a large chunk is), Disney live-action remakes, or whatever Netflix or Amazon Prime is cooking up. The list goes on and on — this is just a starter pack for you to indulge in if you’re strapped for time or too lazy to make a list of your own (#valid).

5. Become an unpaid expert.

Now that you are caught up on the hate-watching lore and have your niche, it’s time to become a certified expert in your field. The first step of this recruiting process is learning how to market what is essentially doomscrolling as an important art form. Us professional hate-watchers do not just know random facts and unimportant characters’ names. Oh no, we have standards. Standards which prepare us for toe-to-toe battles with that one friend who swears that Riverdale Season 3 Episode 19 is actually good, not a knockoff version of a beloved musical (I’m still pissed about this totally hypothetical scenario). The moral of the story here is that you need to be able to trash the show accurately. Otherwise, you’ll just be called a hater, not a hate-watcher. And what a bummer that would be.

Congratulations! You have just received your hate-watching certification! Now go out there and become obsessed with a show or movie that you don’t like. Try not to think about the irony of putting all this effort into something that you dislike, and just enjoy detest the show!