Sign-Off
Television only ever had one real advantage: there was nothing else. For decades that was enough. You sat in front of the box because the alternatives were going outside or staring at a wall or talking to your family, and sometimes the box won even when it was showing something genuinely terrible. That captive audience built entire media empires—and produced, not coincidentally, some of the worst content ever put in front of human eyes.
The argument that the internet would kill television has been going around for years, and the people making it are right but they’ve been right too long to still sound smart. The actual death is quieter and more personal than any thinkpiece predicted. I don’t watch television anymore. Not out of principle—I just stopped. When I want to watch a film or a series, I download it, carry my laptop to bed, scatter biscuit crumbs across the duvet, and watch it on my own schedule. I can pause it to make tea. I can watch the same scene four times. I can fall asleep twenty minutes in and pick it back up two days later without having missed anything I can’t recover.
News was the other holdout argument—the idea that broadcast television would always be the fastest path to what was actually happening in the world. That collapsed years ago. By the time the evening broadcast is assembled and packaged and delivered, the story has already been written, debated, revised, and sometimes retracted online. The international sources are better anyway. Faster, more detailed, less filtered through the institutional anxieties of national broadcasters who need to maintain access to the people they’re covering.
What’s left is institutional inertia. Networks that spent decades building infrastructure—studios, transmission towers, regulatory licenses, talent contracts—can’t just pivot because the audience is leaving. So they do what failing institutions always do: double down on the cheap stuff that still gets numbers. Talent shows, reality television, endless procedural dramas in their fifteenth season. The logic is sound from a short-term financial perspective and catastrophic from every other one. You watch the casting show because it’s on and you’re tired, and then you feel vaguely worse about yourself, and you do it again next week.
The genuinely strange thing is how clearly television demonstrates its own obsolescence. Somewhere in the world, something significant is happening right now, and half the channels are running a rerun or a cooking competition. The mismatch between what exists in the world and what appears on a broadcast schedule has become so extreme it reads as willful denial. Not malice—just the gap between an industry built around controlling distribution, and a world where distribution is no longer the hard part.
I don’t think this requires mourning, exactly. Some of what’s being lost is worth a passing acknowledgment—the shared cultural moment of everyone watching the same thing at the same time, the feeling of stumbling onto something you never would have chosen. But most of what’s dying is scheduling tyranny and lowest-common-denominator programming decided by a handful of people who determined what the rest of us should want. Losing that isn’t a tragedy. It’s just an ending.