Bonus: and that likely explains why older shows tend to have self-contained episodes while newer shows tend to be serial.
On the flip side they’ll not get to experience knowing that the channel you were watching was the exact same for everyone. It feels really strange and isolating to me to know that what’s on my TV right now is streaming just to me.
I know it’s silly; we were still watching TV alone, but there was something about knowing that other people were watching the same thing at the same time that made it better.
In my opinion, watching TV was a better experience and healthier and better, including for - but not limited to - children.
(I’ll preface this by saying I am referring to German TV, where you would get one break of commercial ads of 5-8 minutes within a show of 30 minutes, and two such breaks within a show of 60 minutes. I know in the US you get more, shorter commercial breaks. I think that makes the argument a bit stronger; however, I think it still applies to US TV as well.)
First off, you needed discipline. You want to watch that one show that airs at 3:10? You better be at home at 3:10 then. You had to make plans and keep this scheduled like an appointment, or plan to record it and program a VHS recorder.
Second, you also had to focus. No rewinding. If you miss it, you’ll have missed it. Stay focused. No phone scrolling, no attention span shortening, no second screen. You better focus your attention.
Third, you don’t binge watch. I love binge watching as much as the next person. But is it good for you? Cliffhangers are there for a reason. Having this excitement and thrill be resolved within seconds by starting the next episode takes away from the experience. Already knowing that you could just click on “play” any time you want takes something away from having to wait, waiting to know, thinking about it, imagining scenarios how something will play out in your head.
You get your daily or weekly dose of dopamine from this show, and that’s it. You don’t go on a bender. You are also automatically limiting your screen time. Especially for kids I think that is an important point. You can watch peppa pig endlessly on youtube, until you’re absolutely sick of it, or until your parents put an end to it. But if there is just one episode of pokemon a day, that’s it. You gotta wait until tomorrow. There’s nothing you can do.
Let’s even say you watch multiple shows in a row. Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Art Attack, Galileo, The Simpsons. Every show gives you something else. Another plot, other emotions, other characters. You have to follow different storylines or have some non-fiction program points. That’s more diverse than watching 5 hours of handmaid’s tale or breaking bad in a row.
And even ads. Ads allow you to zap. Allow you to release this thrill that we now do with scrolling. But it, again, is self limited - you better be back in time before the commercials end. Who of us has not had days where they spent more time looking at trailers and thumbnails on Netflix etc than they spend watching an actual movie or show.
I have to add that I absolutely love your point about isolation and watching alone. I will absolutely add this the next time I am arguing that TV was better for our brains, kids, health, and sociality.
I even feel like when people from the same household are watching the same show, they now prefer to watch it alone in their rooms at their own comfort and pace. How sad is that? Is it more comfortable? Yeah sure, maybe. But TV was more social. Having to be quiet for the sake of the others. Waiting to ask “wait what did he say I didn’t get it” until there is a good time and waiting to reply until there is a good time again. This is effort. This is socializing. This is community. Using quotes from the show you watched as inside jokes.
Man I really miss TV.
Now, even when I watch cable, I’m not sure very many people are watching at the same time because a lot of people are DVRing it
Also, thanks to the practice of broadcast syndication, new series were often given at last 3-4 seasons to run even if the ratings weren’t great at first since it was more profitable to get the series to around 80 to 100 episodes then to cancel it early.
you say that but Jellyfin has a random button so you can get random episodes from anything in your media library.
Eh good. Itvsucked following shows like that
I dunno. I find that enough movies and tv shows get chopped up into shorts and served to my fyp that it’s very similar to channel surfing sometimes. I feel like I’ve seen most of a few different movies served to me in random order with no context.
I never would have expected to, but I miss channel surfing.
Now I get analysis paralysis flipping through a million thumbnails on various streaming services and I don’t see anything I want to commit to, but if I was channel surfing, 20 seconds of a nature documentary might be all it takes for me to settle in and learn more about horseshoe crabs.
I miss those nature shows. They are way more interesting than they sound on paper. Thanks for reminding me of those and solving my analysis paralysis.
You might enjoy blippo plus.
I just heard about it on the Post Games podcastI don’t get it…it’s a streaming service that only shows pretaped fake shows, but airs them as if it were live tv?
Alternatively https://90s.myretrotvs.com/ for real TV recordings you can flip through
I’ve spent many hours with 80s and 90s commercials playing on YouTube.
There was a charm to it, I discovered lots of programs from the randomness, one of which is my all time favourite doctor who (it caught me off guard as I saw what I now know was the third doctor Jon Pertwee being beaten up by Morris dancers). It’s the one thing I wish was integrated into streaming services. Just a ramdomiser button and it plays whatever.
I always said Netflix should add a favorite shows category that you could play on shuffle (like Pandora radio)
It is really weird to be able to have all my shows in order. Shows like south park doesn’t matter as much since most of the episodes aren’t multipart, but the cartoon wars and episodes 200 and 201 were pretty awesome to watch back to back weeks live.
Yeah, everything had to be self contained so it could be syndicated. Not so much now.
Well, neither do I. When I was growing up the country only had two channels. The dull BBC-content-that-enriches-minds channel and the everything else channel.
