Turning Television off in Adulthood
I have TV amnesia. I can’t tell you if Don Draper got married a third time or if Walter White walks among mortals. A few months upon viewing, I’ll have forgotten the most important broad strokes of a television plot. My friends marvel at this forgetfulness: but you’ve seen these shows! I have; this is true. But in many ways, I might as well have not.
I, along with many people I know, seem to be addicted to watching TV shows online. In college, muffled voices from different shows could be heard simultaneously from suitemates’ closed doors well into the night. The real world held a vague promise of responsible viewership, but little changed after the shift to a nine-to-five office routine: when I worked in DC, I would often go straight home and open my laptop, put on a show, cook dinner to the droning of its conversations, and view said show, actively or passively in intermittence, until my roommate walked by, or someone called, or I felt that an appropriate bedtime had been reached. Watching television did not feel like an activity. It was a default in the absence of activity, a cranial state of passive, purring contentment.
It is a trait I feel sheepish admitting to. Only to my truest friends’ inquiring texts will I respond “just watching TV at home”; if a co-worker asks what I did the previous night, I will answer with a cryptic “not much”, which truly understates the herculean task of finishing half a season of Suits.
It may be the plague of an era. Personally, a disposition for abusive consumption of the cinematic arts stretches well back into childhood. Back then; it was all about the movies. Compared to online streaming services’ eclectic and paltry selection today, which seems, thanks to actual respect of copyrights, to contain either classics we’ve watched a million times or suspicious low-budget movies, China, where I grew up, had ever-expanding, all-encompassing offerings, brought to you by men rolling carts full of pirated films down your neighborhood streets. The man outside the FamilyMart who knew my mother’s and my taste would, every time we walked by after groceries, shuffle through cardboard DVD packages faster than Netflix could compile a “Because you watched” list and hand us half a dozen of the newest movies he thought we might like. In those years, such access was imaginably much harder in America. Movies were a costly good, their availability not yet democratized by on-demand services. Few could afford to binge on them. Not so across the Pacific: in the pre-Torrent days, China was addicted to American entertainment more cheaply than America itself was.
It was with this training that I left for the U.S., right at the dawn of television’s Golden Age. Nowadays, I seldom choose movies over TV shows when I’m home from work. An important switch had occurred in my own consumption patterns, even though movies, in my abstract ideals, remained more genuine artistic endeavors than a vast array of shows. Why, then, choose to spend my time on entertainment that I ultimately found forgettable?
I’ll venture to say that it is because for many of us, consuming TV has become half-entertainment, half-therapy, and movies don’t square with the therapy part. Unlike TV shows, they are too contained within their one or two hour stretches. Their completion is in itself a disincentive. The soothing, therapeutic effect of TV shows lies in knowing that once an episode is over, there will be another. You have the liberty to continue or stop, but your investment in the characters and plotlines can be lazy yet still have a sprawling multi-season payoff. This is true even when you don’t even like the characters: I could not stand Rory or Lorelai Gilmore, but I still watched all seasons of Gilmore Girls, including the Netflix revival, feeling irritation more than contentment, praying that they would kill off either mother or daughter. Once a show is begun, I let it play itself to completion—with no particular love, I’ll burn through episodes deep into the night, until reaching a point of oversaturation and disgust.
A famous dissection of web culture categorizes web content as a dyad: stock and flow. Stock, for hefty, quality content with staying power; flow, for what is basically your Facebook newsfeed. Now, flow gets the rap for its vapidity, clickbaitiness, and being instantly forgettable, but it’s got one trump card: it never ends. The ball’s in your court to quit scrolling, but you know the flow is still flowing, with all the glorious comfort of incessancy.
If movies are stock, then web-streamed TV is flow. Not necessarily in substance, but at least in the way in which it is often consumed. TV shows’ therapeutic effects (although possibly not their appeal as a social, communal activity) would likely be greatly diminished if they were watched the traditional way: tune in next week for an all-new episode. Serialization is getting phased out: even Serial, NPR’s hit podcast, is being rebranded as S-town, because (possibly coerced by our increasingly Netflixian consumption habits) all episodes of the new season will be released at once, and the irony of keeping the original name must be too great to bear.
Examining my own viewing patterns provides all the more support for television as therapy: often, selection of a show corresponds to emotional needs of a period. Cue Breaking Bad for post-study abroad blues, when sunny, blue-skied New Mexico countered the New England gloom (although drug wars hardly lifted my mood, BB was too good to quit). In high school I watched Gossip Girl and 90210 because they offered the impossible glamour a teen aspires to. I’ve only ever watched Lost on a treadmill, because the marine horizons of the island on my phone were a small rectangular oasis in the greys and blacks of the gym. But, in the truly low valleys of my TV-career, the most defining quality of mindless therapeutic watching was that the show needed to be a comedy, and light. Modern Family is often a perfect contender: witty, well-written, incredibly sanitized. Sitcoms generally do the job—though not truly fresh air for the soul, they are safe, and long, and run on mini-plots so episodically resolvable that seasons can be indefinitely renewed and need not respect the concept of a grand build-up towards completion (until the studios say so).
At this precise juncture in history, where prolonged laptop usage meets the explosive growth of webcast entertainment, we are part of an experimental wave that has not yet earned widespread condemnation (from each other, and certainly not from the media industry) regarding our ever-expansive rate of TV-show viewing. To paraphrase David Foster Wallace’s famous treatise on human addiction and television, the not-so-secret goal of the TV-industry has always been to get us to watch more TV. To that end, web streaming is the first half of a golden ticket, and our own increasingly supine disposition is the second.
It’s hard to shake the thought that in our web streaming interface lurks the threat of a new opiate for the masses: I think that I am different than the perennial American couch potato, an unthinking specimen glued to the screen, because I watch television as a therapeutic respite from an otherwise productive life. Yet, undeniably, the never-ending flow of TV episodes offers me comfort in continuity. The tired brain of the digital age often wants more long-term payoff, less waiting, and plain-old boundless content.
In the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that I will cease watching TV-shows in monstrous quantities. My only endeavor will be to replace my TV diet, in part, with movies (baby steps—books are the loftiest of goals for the TV addict). There is something to be said about the moment a movie ends, the credits roll, and you sit there having encompassed all stages of a narrative arc, in a state of mental digestion. Sinking into you is the weight of the entertainment.
My Flash player went out of date two weeks ago, and the technological burden of updating it is proving insurmountable. Since I’m currently visiting my parents in Shanghai, all US web-streaming sites are off-limits. The man outside the corner store is still there, but he now sells flowers, though I’ve been told that he keeps pirated DVDs in his minivan for buyers in the know. In China, where technology is often half-a-step ahead, web-streamed shows have been enabled on smartphones long ago. The Chinese TV-industry has been churning out hundreds of phone-screen-friendly webisodes shot and produced the second a new flavor of the day appears. On the Shanghai subway, during rush hour, a sea of heads bow towards screens, earphones plugged-in, deaf to the broadcast announcement reminding riders to check whether they’ve missed their stop. They are all watching television.
