Television Raised Me

Television raised me. Not father figures, not real people—just the glow of a screen, American families, cartoon characters pushed to absurdity, and the dream of living inside that flickering world. While my mother worked and my friends were grounded, the TV was my teacher, telling me what was good and evil, how to break my life into neat episodes with resolvable problems, always ending with something fixed as the credits rolled. That was the deal. It worked.

Now I can’t stand German television. What used to feel colorful, with actual culture mixed in, is just sludge—endless rotations of the same faces, reality-TV desperation, shows built around filming people having crises like it’s entertainment. The private stations especially are shameless about it. And the public broadcasters just stand there with their educational mandate, retreating into time slots nobody watches anymore because everyone already knows TV is dead. It makes me want to smash something.

So I sit with my laptop downloading shows I actually want. Mad Love, episodes of Skins, old The O.C. reruns—everything that won’t hit Germany for years, if it gets here at all. I refresh, wait for the files, move them into folders like I’m building a library. It’s cleaner this way. I watch what I want, when I want, without commercials or schedules or German bureaucracy deciding what’s acceptable.

The thing is, I know I’m being a hypocrite. These shows have to be funded somehow, and I’m not paying for them. If most of the country stayed plugged into cable, networks would have money to keep making things worth watching. I know this perfectly well. But the logic is simple enough to ignore—why give my attention to something broken when I can get better on my own terms? It’s a comforting argument and probably won’t stand up to scrutiny, but here we are.

Television’s dominance is ending anyway. It’s only still alive because of habit now, inertia, money, the fact that most people don’t know where else to look. The next generation will grow up online, shaped by whatever they find there instead of what someone in an office thought was suitable. Whether that’s better or worse, I have no idea. I’m aware I’m not helping the cause either way. But I’m not waiting around for German television to get good.