OK, the scientist is me. But now that you’ve been sufficiently click-baited, might as well stay for the fun, right?
Good.
I’m not here to demonize television. I love TV. I probably love it too much. During my freshman year my roommate was watching "30 Rock," which I consider the funniest show of all time. So I was watching with him. One night he threw on an episode and, as Netflix wants, new episodes kept playing and we kept watching.
Finally, I turned to my roommate and said, “Didn’t we just watch a Christmas episode?”
We had. Around 12 hours ago. We watched a year’s worth of "30 Rock" in one night. It was then that I had the first moment of clarity in my telaholic life.
Why do we watch so much TV? Because it’s entertaining. It’s distracting. It’s fun. In the end, pleasure is what it boils down to. Doesn’t matter if you are hitting the cultural high-brow of "Breaking Bad" and "The Wire" or the perceived low-brow of "The Big Bang Theory" and "Keeping Up with the Kardashians." Watching copious amounts of TV still amounts to us sitting somewhere and passively staring at a screen for hours.
And here lies the problem. Everyone needs an escape, and TV is the best means we have to do it with no input. What else to humans use to passively escape? Alcohol, drugs, etc. If Uncle Joe spent as much time drinking as he did watching "Parks and Rec" your mom would organize an intervention.
But TV is different. Nobody is going to organize an intervention for a Netflix addiction. But what is the difference? Both alcohol and TV give pleasure freely, without forcing the end user to work for it. Both are used to temporarily solve problems that they create. Both are linked to higher rates of depression.
That’s right. If you don’t remember, a bunch of “studies” came out last year showing a correlative link between binge watching and depression. They did not provide any direct causation, so that’s what I will attempt to do.
Television in general, and binge watching in particular, appeals to lonely people. Even those who dislike being around others, the hyper-introverted and agoraphobic, need basic human connection. And that is exactly what the fiction industry is in the business of providing.
People who hate being around other people generally are that way because they don’t like being watched. Sure, they find some people annoying and post things like “I love animals more than people” on Facebook (animals don’t use social media), but humans are social creatures and need to interact. That’s why solitary confinement is considered cruel and inhumane under international law.
Remember, I am not anti-television. I think all types of fiction are important for many reasons. Since TV is the most popular form of fiction at the moment, it is of even greater cultural importance. But, like any recreational sedative, it should be enjoyed in moderation. So why isn’t it? The New York Times published an article way back in 1990 that revealed frequent TV viewing had many similarities to alcohol and drug addiction. But today, our rate of television addiction is much higher than alcoholism.
It’s because TV offers more. It is the perfect escape from loneliness, almost as if by design. I could spend this Saturday alone, or I could go to Pawnee and hang out with Leslie Knope and the parks department. They’re always fun and relatable!
Relation and connection without interaction or effort. If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is. Leslie Knope and Walter White and Liz Lemon all exist in a parallel universe that we can see but can’t impact. This saves us from the pains of being watched and judged. Instead of numbing us to depression and loneliness, it simulates a sense of emotional connection. Which is so much more powerful but so much more dangerous from a purely habit-forming perspective (last I checked, though, nobody has died from TV withdrawal).
Television takes character connections a step further. TV as a medium sort of has become a character itself through the employment of metafiction. Comedies do this more than dramas, although the first season of "Fargo" was a metacommentary on the anti-hero genre. "Community" and "30 Rock" in particular made a lot of jokes about the television format itself. Before them, "The Simpsons" did it. Before "The Simpsons" was "Murder, She Wrote." And then suddenly we’re all the way back in the 1700s with "Canterbury Tales" as the first holistic work of metafiction.
If the average American watches between five and seven hours of TV per day, then we are all going to see the same patterns repeated over and over. We are well trained to spot them, and so when TV itself points them out we spot the self-deprecating humor. When "30 Rock" parodies reality television with its "Queen of Jordan" episodes, it accomplishes a few things. First, it always makes a hilarious episode that perfectly captures the tropes of the genre. But second, it forces TV viewers to laugh at themselves. Reality TV only exists because it has an audience. As "30 Rock" points out the tropes of the genre, it is not making fun of how dumb producers of reality shows are, but of how dumb audiences are for falling for (watching) the same tropes over and over. As audience members, we feel invited to the joke not just by our parallel universe pal Liz Lemon, but by real life writer Tina Fey.
All of the metafiction shows listed above, and all those I did not list, apply the same formula. Viewers are invited into a joke about viewers solely because they are viewers. It tricks us into thinking these jokes are made especially for us. “They can’t be making fun of me so blatantly; they’re making fun of other audience members who didn’t get the joke.” TV uses the centuries old tactic of metafiction to appeal to our intellectual vanity and make each member of the viewing community feel smarter than average, trapping us in another faux-connection.
As with any addictive activity meant to circumvent feelings of depression or loneliness, TV only works while it is being consumed. And it works so effectively because of how it makes us feel while we’re away.
The lives of characters must be dense and emotional or there would be no point in watching. By contrast, this can make our own lives feel empty, especially if we spend most of that time watching characters we cannot interact with. If you spend a whole week marathoning "Parks and Rec," you will never live like Leslie Knope because that’s the last thing Leslie Knope (or any TV character outside Abed Nadir) would do. So binging TV traps us in this cycle because we want the connection and emotionally rich lives of characters, but do not feel that we can achieve this outside watching television.
We’ve known binge watching has the same habit-forming qualities as alcohol since at least 1990. Moreover, much of what I have written in this article was presented in the David Foster Wallace essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” way back in 1993. In his mammoth 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," Wallace goes further into our national addiction to entertainment and essentially predicts the rise of Netflix more than a year before the company got off the ground.
What I’m saying is we have known about these problems for over 20 years and have done little to change our behavior. On one level or another, we are all aware of the damage binging does to us psychologically, yet we refuse to stop. Rates of loneliness and depression continue to skyrocket, and we perpetuate the behavior.
If we communally continue to take on a behavior that we know causes psychological pain, isn’t that torture?
