Pablo Cordoba, of Barcelona, Spain, said he had “movie days” on Saturdays with his girlfriend in Mexico City. They use more technological firepower than was required for the first moon landing: two laptops, two iPhones, iTunes, Skype and FaceTime. “Now we just miss holding hands,” Mr. Cordoba said.

The rap against television has long been that it “isolates people from the environment, from each other, and from their own senses,” as Jerry Mander famously said in his 1978 book, “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.” But what these arduous efforts to sync-watch suggest is that the medium isn’t intrinsically isolating or intrinsically social. It is only a medium, and the way people use it — and other technologies with it — decides whether it becomes more like a sealed-off phone booth or a rollicking, motormouth coffeehouse.

What is clear these days is that viewers around the world are determined to push for the coffeehouse vision: sync-watching joins other phenomena, like the live-tweeting of shows and programs and the creation of fan content on platforms like Tumblr. If these efforts spread to a wider public, discussion, debriefing, remixing and live-snarking may one day be considered the authentic TV-viewing experience, even more than sitting alone in a BarcaLounger, armed with snacks.

“There is something about taking that emotional plunge together which is more comforting for the viewer,” said Sylvia Tonska, another Facebook respondent. “People need people, and television takes our emotions to a level sometimes we will never experience in our own life; it’s nice to have your partner at your side during that mini adventure on your couch.”

But the world today — and its copyrights and connectivity issues in particular — can conspire against those who long to watch together over distances. What is free and streaming in one nation is illegal or DVD-only in another. Someone with lightning-fast Internet in one region struggles to sync-watch with a lover with spottier access.

And so sync-watchers have hacked an array of workarounds to stay connected. They share episodes using Dropbox. They fire up a show on iTunes on a laptop, then use Skype’s screen-sharing feature to beam it to, say, China, and a friend behind its Great Firewall. They poise iPads on their beds and turn on FaceTime so that others can watch their faces reacting to the wilder twists of plot. They text and Facebook-message during the show to share their astonishment and judgmental asides. Sometimes they must resynchronize after ads, as different patches of earth sprout different promotions.