Commentary

TV's Age Of Anxiety

  • by , Op-Ed Contributor, November 14, 2018

We live in anxious times, although it will take a thousand social scientists to explain why that’s the case at a time of relative peace, general prosperity, and mostly miraculous medical care.

You would think that the television, once derided as a national narcotic and a place where couch potatoes go to veg out, would provide an escape from anxiety, but it doesn’t.  And I’m not just talking about the content of television programming, which itself leans to the alarming.

No, what I find anxiety-inducing on TV is the 21st century phenomenon called “fear of missing out,” or FOMO.  There’s just too much television to watch or even keep straight.  

This leads to the sense that we’re missing out on interesting television content that other people are enjoying.  This feeling is only exacerbated by the many podcasts, blogs, websites and Twitter accounts dedicated to helping us navigate through the best of TV.  They’re always marveling at shows we’ve barely heard of.  

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It seems like a lifetime distant, but just 10 years ago, a reasonably alert person could keep a list of all the great TV shows to watch in his head. 

Not so today.  As TV content has expanded exponentially, there are must-see TV shows hidden all over the TV spectrum, if I can only remember what they are or where they’re located. Unless I literally write them down on a list I keep on my phone, I never think about them again — until the NEXT time someone mentions them.  

In this regard, the streaming services are singularly unhelpful.  Netflix in particular does not believe in advertising its shows. Indeed, there are so many of them that it would be impractical.  (Although I did read in the Wall Street Journal that Netflix does post a lot of billboards in Los Angeles to mollify its stars.)  

Instead of traditional advertising or marketing, Netflix makes you aware of new content by prominently placing on your welcoming screen the shows its algorithm thinks you want to see. 

First of all, I don’t have that much faith in these “if you like this, you might like that” algorithms. They are nowhere near as sophisticated as they seem.  But more important, there’s such a gush of new content that you’re likely to miss a fantastic new series if you don’t log on for a couple of days and they’ve moved on to promoting something else.

Counterintuitively, our TV-related anxiety is rising even as it’s easier to watch TV any time, any place.  Given the rise of time-shifting and multiple video platforms, there’s no reason to ever miss a program.  In the pre-DVR age, if you skipped an episode of your favorite show, that was it. It disappeared into the broadcast ether and you’d never see it unless you were lucky enough to catch it on reruns or wait several years for syndication.  

Yet the truth is, if you missed an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” or “All in the Family,” you didn’t really care that much.  All the episodes were more or less interchangeable.  Since there was no narrative arc over the series, you weren’t being deprived of important plot developments if you had better things to do Saturday night than to sit around watching TV.  In other words, because TV was just entertainment and not “art,” you didn’t need to sweat seeing every episode.

A related challenge for watching TV these days is too much choice.  People think they want a lot of options — but they don’t, really.  There’s nothing quite a paralyzing as going into an ice cream story with 60 flavors and trying to pick the one that will give you the richest, most sensational ice cream experience.

 Same with TV.  When I look at all the shows on Netflix, they all seem pretty good, but I worry that I’ll be wasting my precious TV-consuming time by not watching the very highest-quality show.    We’d be better off with fewer shows and more obviously terrific ones.

Needless to say, my complaint falls under the category of “first-world problems.”  With all the despair in the world, am I really going to feel sorry for myself because I feel overwhelmed by the TV landscape?  

Uh. Yeah.  Maybe it doesn’t rise to the level of justified anxiety, like fear of losing a job or getting a disease, but there’s no question that whenever my wife and I sit down to watch TV at night, I feel a sense of pressure to pick the “right” show for us to watch.  Life is too short to waste on “only OK” television.

What I really need is an app to help me find and remember content regardless of whether it’s broadcast, cable, or streaming.  Can someone invent that and give me some piece of mind? 

1 comment about "TV's Age Of Anxiety".
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  1. Douglas Ferguson from College of Charleston, November 15, 2018 at 10:14 a.m.

    Precious TV-consuming time? Never thought of it quite that way. Tomorrow is another day.

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