The Same Laugh Track, Every Night

There’s a specific despair that comes from accidentally landing on a channel and finding The Big Bang Theory—not because someone chose it, but because it’s simply always there, running on a loop, laugh track intact, optimized for the lowest possible attention required from everyone involved. German commercial networks ProSieben and Sat.1 perfected this model years ago. At some point they stopped programming television and started manufacturing wallpaper.

What’s strange is that it wasn’t always this way. In the early 2000s there was genuine ambition—original productions, imported cult shows before they became cultural furniture, scheduling that felt like someone with taste was making decisions. Then something shifted, and the schedules collapsed into an endless rotation of cheap US acquisitions and local formats built on the assumption that audiences will tolerate anything if it’s familiar enough.

The reason isn’t a mystery. Journalist and satirist Philipp Walulis dug into it at walulis.de: ProSieben and Sat.1 share a parent company, which means their combined scheduling strategy is less about programming and more about asset management. Running fifty episodes of The Big Bang Theory back to back costs almost nothing and generates predictable ad revenue from an audience too passive to reach for the remote. Every rerun is a small profit. The whole system is designed to produce the minimum viable television.

What Walulis captures well is how the illusion of choice—many channels, many time slots—masks a structure where almost everything flows back to the same balance sheet. You can switch from one network to the other and still be watching the same company’s investment. The variety is aesthetic, not economic.

This kind of television doesn’t try to be bad. It just has no incentive to be good. Which might be the more depressing realization.