Internet Killed the Video Star
Television raised me. Not in the metaphorical way people say when they want to sound like they had a complicated childhood—I mean it literally. My mother worked, my friends were under house arrest or otherwise unavailable, and the TV was on all day. It taught me what was good and evil. It taught me that problems can be resolved within forty-five minutes and that you should be grinning by the credits.
American families. Cartoon characters drawn with exaggerated features. A constant low hum of someone else’s world. My entire personality is assembled from that material—not from flesh-and-blood role models or anything as dignified as "life experience," but from a circulating loop of broadcast television. I knew the programming schedule six months out. I idolized the presenters. I wanted to live inside the screen.
Then at some point it became unwatchable.
I don’t mean this in the way every generation decides TV has gotten worse. I mean it clinically: what was once a functional mix of entertainment, news, and actual culture curdled into a gray slurry of reality programming so aggressively stupid it feels like a cognitive attack. The networks discovered you could put random people with chaotic home lives in a flat, film them falling apart, and call it entertainment. A conveyor belt of misery dressed up as drama. And it works. That’s the part that makes me want to lie down.
The public broadcasters meanwhile wave their educational mandate like a white flag and retreat into programming for people who are already giving up on life. Nothing with teeth. Nothing that takes a risk. TV is dead and it’s making me stupid by proximity—I can feel it happening each time I flick past the listings.
So I stopped. The laptop blinks. First episodes of Mad Love downloaded successfully—a show that might make it to my corner of the world in two or three years, maybe, if the right people decide the audience is ready for it. Sitting in a folder somewhere between Bored to Death, Skins, and a half-finished rewatch of old The O.C. episodes I’m pretending is ironic. It is absolutely not ironic.
Why would I spend a single minute of my life on broadcast television when I can watch whatever I want, whenever I want, as much or as little as I like, without commercials or censorship or some network executive deciding what time slot I deserve? The quality is better. The selection is better. Nothing is scheduled. Nothing is held hostage until fall.
I know the logic is one-sided. The shows I actually want to watch have to be financed somehow, and there’s a certain accidental generosity in the majority of the population not knowing what a torrent is—all those people stuck watching whatever gets put in front of them, funding the machine that produces the things I steal. That’s not a comfortable thought, but here we are.
Television’s grip is loosening. What’s keeping it alive is habit, money, and greed—the unholy trinity of every dying medium. The next generation won’t be formed by late-night cartoons and Saturday afternoon movies the way I was. They’ll be formed entirely by whatever the internet decides they should become. Whether that’s better or just differently bad, I honestly don’t know.