We walk into one of our local pizza spots, pull up to the bar, and watch the end of the Phillies game while we place order. Food orders, not drink orders. They just bring those over after we give the nod to Sam in response to “lite and a lager?”

The game ends, the room groans. We lost on this occasion, if that’s not obvious. And then, because it’s a weeknight crowd and nobody is reaching for the jukebox, all the TVs get flipped to The Game Show Network.

The baseball game is mostly side-chatter and reactions. But the Game Show is everybody paying attention. Like, close attention. We’re in that game. In a different type of way.

The rules, so far as I can tell, are - you don’t have to talk to anybody else at the bar, but you’re all playing the game together with the TV, and everybody knows it.

America Says is the show, and if you’ve never seen it, it’s basically a Family Feud style survey show with John Michael Higgins as host (Christopher Guest bonus points). This lends itself perfectly to communal watching.

The show poses a question like “My ____ is better than my neighbor’s” and then a word cloud of first-letters with varied lengths of blank line after them. In this case G_____ is driving everybody in the bar crazy, and on TV, because it’s not grass or garage. Some guy across the room says garden. When the answer is revealed to be garden, we all sort of grunt in approval.

Points for our team.

It’s the most pro-communal yet anti-social thing I think I’ve ever been a part of.

We sip our beers and eat our food and play the games, occasionally taking a minute to talk to each other, or say something neighborly to a neighbor in the room.

When you finish you leave and know you’ll be back, never too far in the future, and some version of the same experience can happen again.

You can’t market or sell or pitch this. Nobody opens a bar with this as the genius idea. You just have to experience it. It just has to happen.

And I love a place like that, that makes and lets it happen, which is why we keep going back.