Over at his substack, Matt Yglesias muses about television and suggests that maybe it's something we should panic about:
As Tim Cook encourages us to spend more time sitting alone in dark rooms, enjoying immersive audiovisual experiences, I can’t help but think that the panickers, at least those of the last few decades, might have been on to something.
....The unprecedented cornucopia of entertainment at our fingertips (ubiquitous smartphones, great televisions, streaming anywhere, on-demand everything) is very much a mixed blessing that is significantly exacerbating loneliness and other social ills.
....The mistake of the moral panickers has been to pay too much attention to the content of the entertainment and not enough to their form. Something that you do with friends, whatever it is, has some useful spillover effects in terms of strengthening social bonds. Something that you do in isolation does not.
This makes sense. There's only one problem with it:
It's certainly true that TVs have gotten better and TV content is higher quality. Nevertheless, TV watching has been steadily decreasing for the past two decades.
This data isn't perfect. For one thing, it doesn't tell us anything about young kids. For another, it's based on diary entries that include only the simple option of "Watching TV." There's no telling if respondents interpret this as all TV, including streaming on phones and tablets, or only TV watched on a conventional big screen.
Still, it's highly suggestive that although young people have more and better TV options than ever before, they're watching less of it. Instead, gaming and computer use have gone up and outdoor activities have stayed steady:
So TV watching—which is often done alone—is down while sports are as popular as they've ever been. At the same time, gaming and social media, which are typically done with other people, are both growing. Gaming has more than doubled since 2003 and social media use has skyrocketed.
Excessive screen time overall may be a problem. But TV specifically? Probably not.
Television took over from spending time with friends back in the 1950s/1960s. Was it ever really that social? I don't remember ever watching television with friends. We turned the set off to talk and do stuff.
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TV was better than ever, but not lately. Many of the excellent and successful new shows have been cancelled, there are fewer new ones in production, and there is again a shift to unscripted shows with the writer's strike. This is a trend that was happening before the strike, with the cancellation of excellent shows.
Maybe this is a response to the decrease in viewership, but it presents a causality problem. If good shows are not being given additional seasons, people feel less invested in watching them, so there is a vicious circle. Drum deals only in correlation, so one cannot tell from a graph what is causing this, only speculate.
Matt feels lonely, writes substack.
I'm so bored with him.
Yeah, I started following Matty when he blogged as an undergraduate philosophy major at Harvard. He's been wrong about things (see, e.g., the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq), but he used to have provocative takes on events. Gradually, he got less and less interesting, and has managed to confuse prolixity for erudition. By the time he went to substack, I realized he wasn't worth paying for.
My primary concern concerning media consumption isn't TV watching per se, but that the enormous time and intensity of our involvement with any media (whether TV, YouTube, gaming, etc.) provide such a powerful distraction from the substantial -- if not existential -- challenges we as a country and inhabitants of a shared planet are facing. The fragmentation of the seemingly limitless quantity of content also makes it that much harder to achieve any sort of shared canon of cultural experience that could unite us together toward taking on these challenges or even to recognize them as challenges instead of some imagined conspiracy.
I fear we could be entertaining ourselves into oblivion.
_This_ is how an alien invasion from space is conducted. No, I'm not kidding, and no I'm not saying this is what has happened. But given the hard ceiling on the highest possible level of technical development, can you think of a better way to go about it?
"Gaming is typically done with other people"? Not in my observation. Gaming is sometimes done with other people, but much of it, probably a majority, is done alone with a machine as the opponent.
You need to get out more. The most popular games nowadays are online and multiplayer.
If you consider that doing things with other people. I don't. I don't see engaging with a fictional online bot as social interaction.
You might want to do a little more research about how multiplayer online gaming works.
Because that's not it. More often than not (especially with the under 30 crowd) most online gaming interactions are with friends you already know.
Many Gen Z males develop and maintain real relationships through MMOG. Those relationships are not limited to online interaction. They are a complement to traditional social interactions.
One of the groomsmen at my son's recent wedding was someone he'd known previously only as a longtime player of a MMOG.
They'd built a real relationship through the game, and this guy flew halfway across the country for the wedding.
Not my thing, but yeah it happens.
I'd contend that the largest social aspect of TV was providing cultural talking points across the population and not just sharing with someone in the same room.
How many times have conversations and social engagement happened because the parties involved had watched the same show or series. Happens all the time across, sports, entertainment, documentaries, and "news".
You da man! Those old shows like F Troop and Hogan's Heroes were absolutely ghastly. That thing you just said is about the only thing that could be said for the TV programming schedule the studio execs pushed on the masses.
You could throw out the titles of turkeys from any period in TV history. Those shows were produced around the same time as Star Trek, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and many other classics.
There will always be a wide range of quality and some will hold up better than others.
Yeah, I don't "watching TV with your friends" was ever a major factor, but talking about TV has become a far larger part of the social fabric.
Yes. I remember the days when we'd all get together at the coffee pot Monday mornings after "Game of Thrones" to discuss the latest episode. And before that, "Babylon 5." (yes, I'm old...)
Personally, I've been strongly thinking about dropping my regular TV service, Yahoo, altogether.
Except for the periodic big event of some kind, (and What We Do in the Shadows), the only thing I watch anymore is the news and that seems increasingly tedious, with hour after hour of dull jabbering on just that one select mono-news story, chewed over and over robotically.
Meanwhile,
More people are avoiding the news, and trusting it less, report says,
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/more-people-are-avoiding-news-trusting-it-less-report-says-2022-06-14/
Which probably speaks to why there isn't more popular outrage over Donald Trump, but seemingly malaise and confusion, --which we should blame entirely on Fox.
I would dispute that TV is better than ever.
The network episodic shows are likely worse than ever--nearly unwatchable for anyone of any discernment and that was not always true.
And the "prestige" shows on the streaming services, well from where I sit, these are all high budget soap operas. It's all sudden twists, cliff angers, and they all seem designed to make the viewer feel like garbage at the end of every episode.
The lower budget streaming shows all attempt to copy this approach to story telling and the result is you basically never get to see a complete or coherent story. Every episode is just setup for the next, and every season finale is just a setup for the next season. And by the time you get to a series finale you forget why you started watching in the first place.
When we talk about binging food we generally are not praising the food that makes us do this. I'm not sure why we should feel any different about TV shows.
> " It's all sudden twists, cliff angers, and they all seem designed to make the viewer feel like garbage at the end of every episode. "
This does not describe any of the "prestige" shows that I've watched. The three best shows I've watched in the last, say, 8 years (Deadwood, True Detective Season 1 and Mare of Easttown) specifically avoid everything you've described here. Shows that others in my family have watched and raved about (say, Mad Men, Breaking Bad) also do not do this sort of thing much, if at all.
The best thing to happen to TV in the last 10 years has been the rise of the "miniseries", which is stupid shorthand for "i have a story to tell that has a beginning, middle and end, and after that it will be over". Granted, the majority of TV does not follow this model, but compared to 20 years ago, there is a LOT more of this sort of thing out there now.
Did not watch Mare but 100% of the other shows you mention do that plenty, though it is worth mentioning most of those went off the air 10 years ago. If you did not feel like a pile of garbage at the end of every episode of Deadwood, True Detective, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, there must be 4 other shows with those same names.
Basically every show is now a soap opera, and a dark soap opera at that. The only recent show with any prestige that wasn't was Poker Face (and that was pretty good). I wouldn't mind so much if maybe 30% of the new shows that any effort is made wrt acting, directing, writing, and budget were episodic.
I do agree on high quality miniseries, which there are a lot more of. When there is a clear story to tell over 4 or 8 episodes and the show sticks to that then you can have something enjoyable and satisfying. Though in all seriousness, are any of the new ones really any better than Shogun, from 40 years ago?
So, every show with a plotline that continues from episode to episode is a "soap opera"? Not in my experience.
No, but every multi season show that completely eschews episodic storylines in favor of the multi season story arch, and where the focus is generally on twists and cliffhangers rather than stories that come to a conclusion IS a soap opera, or serial drama if you prefer.
Honestly to me it's like they have replaced our food with soylent green and everyone refuses to notice.
We're more of a Somebody Somewhate / All Creatures
Great and Small / Doc Martin / Derry Girls / etc. viewers (also, we're old people.) Or should say _we_ are but _she_ isn't: she loves her some murder shows that I simply can't stomach. Oh, I don't know if it's to everyone's taste or if it's considered quality programming, but we like to decompress after a long week with The Great British Bake Off. There are drinking rules for this one, like take a drink every time Noel Fielding says 'amuse bouche', chug if he says it more than three times. We like to think it's a shout-out his homies from The Mighty Boosh days ala Carol Burnett.
Oh, sorry, I lost track of the point I was going to make: Yes, we watch our share of TV, arguably more than our share. But shows and different these days and the ones we watch tend to have a run of anywhere from six to seldom more than welve episodes per season.
So, does less TV mean fewer hours watched per week, or fewer shows?
Your television only gets bad shows.
It's a bad tv, need a new one.
Agreed, because my TV mostly gets shows from the past 20 years. Sorry but I have become a true hater of "peak TV". I am just so tired of literally every show (even half-hour comedies) being a serial drama. Can we not get some high quality "case of the week" shows so we can go to bed feeling like the bad guys lost every once in a while?
Sounds like you're looking for Poker Face on Peacock.
Imagine Murder She Wrote, Columbo and The Fugitive as the same show.
But the best show on tv is The Marvelous Mrs Maisel on Prime.
This is exactly what I am looking for. I did really love Poker Face though I fear it was missed by most people because not many have Peacock and show runners will learn the wrong lesson. If there has been another show like Poker Face in the past 15 years I have not heard about it.
Natasha Lyonne seems to have a thing for stuffing easter eggs into her shows. When she did that horse costume bit we shouted 'Cocteau!' at the same to. This one is a murder show I can watch with my partner.
Only Kevin could look at that graph, in which the trendline shows average viewing hours drops from 2.4 to 2.1 hours, but the data shows significant noise levels around the trend, and summarize it as a "steady decline in viewing hours over the last two decades".
Me: TV viewing time hasn't changed much at all over the last two decades.
Kevin is refuting an argument that nobody is making. TV time seperate from all the other screen time....who cares?
Its like tackling a driving issue by only looking at sedans and convertibles while ignoring SUVs and trucks.
Bingo! I had a similar thought: When they talk about teevie watching, is this only broadcast and cable? Or does it include, as it must, streaming services? Access via tablet and (sigh) phone?
Has Marshall McLuhan posted yet? I seem to remember when he had thoughts on the subject, well before PCs and smartie phones.
The trick is to realize that Matt Yglesias is always wrong about everything.