Broadcast Ended

Television had a monopoly for forty years because literally nothing else existed. You could choose between five channels or go outside. That’s it. The networks knew this. They carved out their territory and defended it by being the only thing to turn on. Quality? Irrelevant. Change? Risky. They’d found the minimum viable effort and they were going to do it forever.

Then everything changed and television just kept running the same program.

I don’t watch TV anymore. Not as a protest or anything—just one day I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d turned it on. The channels I used to know by number are completely absent from my life now. I don’t know who’s doing the news. I can’t name a show that’s currently happening. The whole thing is just gone. Replaced by whatever I pick instead of whatever I’m given.

The laziness is staggering. Every format is a duplicate of a duplicate. Casting shows where broke people cry on camera, news cycles that are three hours behind reality, dramas that got tired in 2001 but keep getting renewed. I saw this once—a show that went around the world checking what people watched. Same stuff everywhere. Australia, Germany, Brazil, Tokyo. The same five templates, just redistributed. It’s like television found the one algorithm that barely worked and decided to run it until the universe ends.

Here’s what killed it: Television kept proving it was worthless. Not streaming, not the internet. TV’s own refusal to change once it didn’t have to. It had forty years to figure out how to be worth watching and it decided commercials and reruns were the answer.

I don’t miss it. I thought I would, but there’s a lot of empty space where that habit used to be and I filled it with things I actually wanted to see. When you can choose, you realize how little you were choosing before.