I also think that "it's just a show" is often said by VERY casual fans who aren't really up for discussing TV, but have still entered those spaces.
I've noticed that too, particularly in the spaces where different kinds of fans (people who want casual water cooler chat, people who want to do deep dives, theorycrafters, character admirers, transformative fan types, curative fan types) all end up in the same tag or general forum because that's how modern mainstream social media rolls. Those are all perfectly valid ways of enjoying media, but wires can get crossed when people have different expectations about what talking about a show will look like, and when they think their expectations are universal or the default.
The funny thing is that I feel like I see a lot of people say "It's just a show" while counter-intuitively discussing something like it isn't a show. It's part of what I vaguely think of as the Found Footage Approach, which to be fair I've seen from both people who are casual fans of something and people who are intense fans of something—but either way, where someone rejects the idea that conscious choices were made by multiple people in the writing, directing, acting, and editing of a show, and the idea that different choices could have been made. Not just Death of the Author but Death of the Medium. A show is instead something that just is, sprung into existence fully formed, and talking about how it got there or how it could have been different is as weird as going on about why the sky isn't a slightly different shade of blue.
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I've noticed that too, particularly in the spaces where different kinds of fans (people who want casual water cooler chat, people who want to do deep dives, theorycrafters, character admirers, transformative fan types, curative fan types) all end up in the same tag or general forum because that's how modern mainstream social media rolls. Those are all perfectly valid ways of enjoying media, but wires can get crossed when people have different expectations about what talking about a show will look like, and when they think their expectations are universal or the default.
The funny thing is that I feel like I see a lot of people say "It's just a show" while counter-intuitively discussing something like it isn't a show. It's part of what I vaguely think of as the Found Footage Approach, which to be fair I've seen from both people who are casual fans of something and people who are intense fans of something—but either way, where someone rejects the idea that conscious choices were made by multiple people in the writing, directing, acting, and editing of a show, and the idea that different choices could have been made. Not just Death of the Author but Death of the Medium. A show is instead something that just is, sprung into existence fully formed, and talking about how it got there or how it could have been different is as weird as going on about why the sky isn't a slightly different shade of blue.