#10: The Year I Stopped Watching TV
In 2023, I stopped watching television.
At least it felt like I wasn’t watching television. I didn’t watch The Bear or Beef or Dead Ringers. I skipped The Last of Us.1 My family kept asking if I’d watched A Small Light, the Disney+ Miep Gies show, and I kept saying, I don’t really watch TV. Too long! I’d disappointed them prior by not watching Ted Lasso. I didn’t even watch perhaps the most cinematically friendly entry The Curse—Emma Stone! Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. star Benny Safdie!—because what, I’m supposed to get Showtime? Meanwhile, I was watching movies, movies, movies.
In reality, a couple things were true: 1) I was still watching a fair amount of TV, only it was mostly Selling Sunset and the various Paramount+ housed works of Robert & Michelle King; 2) I’d been skipping big conversation shows for a while now (Tiger King, Normal People) and 3) it’s really not the medium’s fault that once in a while my aversion to doing the thing that everybody’s doing kicks in hardcore and for some reason it tends to be solely aimed at TV and music.
For the last few years, I’ve been parroting the increasingly popular line that TV sucks. In fact this newsletter was originally going to be about how TV sucks, with a few notable exceptions and in my defense, things have been very bad.
I’ve been trying to pinpoint the origin of my discontent with television. Maybe it was the shit-show last season of Game of Thrones, a show which recovered slightly from a nasty overabundance of sexual assault to become decent again only to blow up years of slow and meticulous buildup with a fanfic-y cousin romance/dramatic villain turn that felt like it came out of nowhere. Maybe it was the slew of bad Star Wars shows (Andor’s good; Grogu can go to hell) or the dumb-smart commentary of The White Lotus or Stranger Things2 becoming so trigger-averse it started to bring in new lovable boys to kill off so they could avoid killing off Steve (it has to be done!!).
Here’s where I get myself into trouble: it might have been the Mike Flanagan shows. For the record, I have seen every single one of Mike Flanagan’s Netflix shows, including The Midnight Club which is the most boring show in the world. Aside from that, Flanagan generally makes entertaining, heartfelt horror, full of strong performances and lesbians. I find his work immensely watchable but I also think he’s kind of a dumb guy. Sorry! I loved The Haunting of Hill House right up until he decided to twist Shirley Jackson’s haunting, horrible final words into a message of love and hope. Nerd!!!!! Be SCARY! Flanagan is an exceptionally sincere artist, which is normally a plus for me, but this guy loves a Speech That Says It All, and I hate that. Every October his specific brand of almost-great-but-not mediocrity has me wondering, is that all there is?
One of the primary complaints of “Film Twitter” (sorry to mention this outside of the confines of the space, feels profane) is that TV has become the refuge of the mid-budget drama and we are being robbed of short, sexy thrillers and just-okay, rewatch-forever-on-cable type crime movies that want to be 10 hour miniseries instead. Sometimes these shows do suffer from elongation and become flabby, and sometimes they’re perfectly fine but housed on streaming platforms I don’t have and will not work to acquire. Personally, I feel like book adaptations I was excited about kept becoming shows I never watched. Barry Jenkins directed a well reviewed adaptation of The Underground Railroad and I never saw it because I didn’t have Prime. I never saw Pachinko!
This was the general mood I was in when I threw on the season 4 finale of For All Mankind, one of a handful of shows I remain loyal to. For All Mankind is the decades-spanning Apple TV+ alternate history space race show about what would’ve happened if the Russians had landed on the moon first (a diverse NASA with female astronauts in the 1970s, John Lennon still alive, Charles and Diana don’t get married). I love this show, which heavily favors tense space set pieces that don’t end well and dramatic time jumps (sometimes these happen mid-season… just skipping 10 years, oh it’s thrilling), but season 4 felt strongly like filler to me, full of old characters the show probably should’ve left behind and narratively, just a way to (spoiler?) establish a more robust Mars base for season 5. And then I watched the last episode and cried.
The finale was by no means Great Television, but I cried because I’ve spent a lot of time with these characters (4 seasons and 30 years of their lives) and a lot of their stories were coming to an end. (spoilers ahead!!!!!!) Lee, the North Korean astronaut who first landed on Mars, reunited with his wife. Dani, a female astronaut from the original ‘70s program, survives a space shooting to meet her granddaughter. I have no idea how to succinctly explain what happens to Margo, the NASA flight commander turned unwilling Soviet spy/defector who commits treason by aiding an asteroid heist (for love!). The episode ends with Margo’s voiceover about the importance of feelings and science for science’s sake (well no, the episode actually ends with a 9 year time jump to 2012 where Mars is now bustling & M83’s “Midnight City” plays). For All Mankind benefits in particular from spanning lifetimes, so I’ve watched these astronauts go from bright, young heroes to gray-haired old timers who have been through hell and lost many friends along the way. This is the big sell of TV, getting to watch your friends grow up over years and years.
As I cried, I was reminded of the many good times I’ve had watching television. Off the top of my head (spoilers! spoilers!):
Don sitting alone, listening to “Tomorrow Never Knows” and then turning it off on Mad Men as he faces a world he no longer understands.
I could do a hundred of these on Mad Men so: Peggy quitting to “You Really Got Me,” Joan’s “I can’t wait until next year when all of you are in Vietnam” speech, Zou Bisou Bisou, “The Suitcase,” Pete and Trudy doing the Charleston, Peggy alone after she breaks up with Abe and then Peggy later with Bearded Stan.
The Review episode “Pancakes Divorce Pancakes.”
“Rock the Boat” in Derry Girls, the chalkboard of differences between Protestants and Catholics, “Shoes of the World,” the scene where the girls convince James to stay in Ireland (“you’re a Derry girl now, James”!!) and then immediately start bullying him again <3
“Dance Like Nobody’s Watching”, the 30 Rock episode where Jack is spying on Liz and finds her with a new boyfriend, Criss Chros, as “Camptown Races” plays in the background, sung by a child because Jenna has been judging a reality kids singing competition and Jack didn’t want to pay for any songs and “Camptown Races” was free.
On Starstruck, when Jessie and her friends are playing a game where they mime how tall a person is walking through a doorframe & everyone else has to guess which celebrity it is.
The Bojack Horseman episode where Ruthie, Princess Carolyn's great-great-great-granddaughter, is telling the story of a particularly bad day Princess Carolyn had for a school project… only to reveal that Ruthie is a fantasy Princess Carolyn has when she’s having a bad day, worried about the fact that she may never have kids.
Eric ripping out someone’s heart and drinking it like a juice box on True Blood.
Luke on Lovesick describing the entire plot of Point Break to Dylan before they go out, but also the episode where Luke is in love with Dylan’s cute girlfriend who’s good at trivia who turns out to have died in a car crash.
To be so honest, the Van Gogh episode of Doctor Who. Leave me alone!!!!! This is the Sharon Tate stuff in OUATIH for huge losers.
So no, I don’t hate TV. Maybe nothing will ever be as good as Mad Men, or maybe eventually something will be (probably not). In any case, there’s good TV amid the dreck. What I really hate is that I don’t have enough time to watch TV. I used to work at a publishing company that allowed “creative leave” which was mainly for people who wanted to go write a book, but I always joked that I wanted to take it so I could hole up in a cabin and watch The Sopranos. If I had my dream job (factory where I sort Skittles by color all day while watching TV), I probably wouldn’t have much of an issue at all, but in the real world where I work 9-5 and commute 2 hours, TV is too long. Too much of a commitment. Too unpredictably full of highs and lows. Too plagued by “it gets really good in season 2” (this actually IS true of Succession, which is brilliant—sorry).
I still prefer that the worst thing that can happen with a long movie is that I’m a bit bored for 3 hours, versus sometimes I start a stupid show that sucks but feel compelled to watch 12 hours of it to find out who the murderer is.3 I still likely won’t be taking your recommendation for a new show to watch. But I might watch Reservation Dogs. And if you ever want someone to text about Selling Sunset/Selling the OC (sincerely good television) and The Gilded Age (bad, absurdly timid, but so fun), drop me a line—I’m here.
Actually I started 3/4 of these shows and gave up. Boring, boring, and boring! Feel free to guess in the comments.
This was even before the Brett Gelman/Noah Schnapp of it all… I’m out on this show.
This is why media is so important. Great TV recaps can save lives!!