TV brain rot: The real reason television shows are getting stupider

Is television getting stupider? In today’s entertainment industry, plummeting attention spans and disinterested viewers are being treated less like obstacles to overcome than market opportunities. Last week, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, promoting their new Netflix film The Rip, seemed to confirm what has long been rumoured about Netflix productions – that creators are explicitly advised to accommodate so-called “second-screen viewers”, those who treat TV as something to be half-watched while their foregrounds are preoccupied with Instagram, or TikTok, or a live-blog of the Brooklyn Beckham saga. Damon joked that Netflix had told him: “It wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.” He added: “It’s really going to start to infringe on telling stories.” Well, quite.

It’s hardly a big revelation: even if you hadn’t read the many reports over the past several years about the sort of creative impositions imposed on modern-day showrunners, it’s usually obvious just by watching the end product. You can sense it even in the streamer’s biggest shows, series like Wednesday and Stranger Things, and the recent Harlan Coben adaptation Run Away. It’d be foolish to dismiss every instance of repetitive dialogue, or clumsy exposition, as part of some grand, calculated strategy – but if you watch enough streaming fare, certain patterns invariably emerge. What’s more, it’s usually worse for TV than it is for film, with big-name movie directors often afforded a greater degree of control. The problem, of course, is for those people who aren’t filling out the NYT crossword while watching TV, but actually hoping to sit down and engage with a programme, either for its artistic merit or as pure escapism. For these viewers, needless reiteration makes for a dull and condescending spectacle.

In a sense, of course, there is nothing freshly malignant about this new trend. Back in the days before streaming, before the proliferation of DVD box sets, television also had to tailor itself to a particular kind of passive viewer. It had to account, partly, for those who had tuned in late, missing the first chunk of a programme – and advertising breaks often required characters to recap the action with clunky literalism. The best old TV shows didn’t avoid doing this, but simply found elegant, artful, or even humorous ways to incorporate these reminders. Recall, for instance, the Simpsons episode that returns from an ad break with Homer detailing exactly where the characters now are, and why, only for Bart to comment: “What an odd thing to say.”

Television’s slow slide into stupidity goes beyond this one problem, however. As an artform, TV seems to be regressing on many fronts. I saw a discussion on social media the other day about the lasting impact of The Wire – David Simon’s expansive, sophisticated, and toweringly impressive crime drama that still ranks among the finest screen works of the 21st century. The contention was that the series, despite the universal and zealous acclaim bestowed on it, actually ended up having little influence on the TV that followed – if The Wire used TV’s boundless canvas to push screen storytelling beyond pre-existing boundaries, then no show since has really sought to do the same. And it’s hard to argue this isn’t the case.

It’s true also that other shows from TV’s “golden age” – The Sopranos, Deadwood, or even Mad Men – were doing things that nothing on TV now is successfully attempting. There was an incredible complexity to an episode of The Sopranos, the way that stories mirrored and deepened each other within an hour, that felt truly literary. If we look at the best TV of recent years – take, for instance, Succession, a tremendously smart, funny, well-acted and dextrous work of television – even this does not have the same narrative ingenuity. Fundamentally, its story is straightforward, its meanings manifest. Like all hit shows now, Succession also always kept one eye on social media. Not to the imagined “second-screen viewer”, necessarily, but to the whims of the internet’s zeitgeist vivisectionists. TV shows now must be meme-able first and foremost. Shiv (Sarah Snook) is a fascinating, rounded, and painfully credible character, but didn’t she serve in that pantsuit? Tom and Greg’s thorny dynamic says a hundred different things about the mechanisms of power and class, but what if it were condensed into a homoerotic supercut?

Of course, the jewels of TV’s “golden age” were seismic for a reason; they were smarter and more complex than nearly everything that had come before. But even in the distant past, when TV was still often dismissed as the “Idiot Box”, the fact is that many TV shows were smarter in many ways than what we have now. If you watch an episode of Cheers – a phenomenally popular, low-maintenance, low-commitment sitcom – you might hear references to foreign filmmakers, to classical musicians, to Russian novelists. The level of assumed knowledge back then was far greater; now, TV is rarely adventurous in its allusions.

To some extent, this isn’t TV’s fault, but more a reflection on the world we live in: as our shared monoculture has splintered and diffused, there simply isn’t the same bank of references to draw upon. (The ubiquitously recognisable talking points that do exist almost always belong to younger, more currently popular spheres of culture: pop music; cinema.) But that’s only half an excuse – not everyone who watched Cheers would have been expected to know who Gustav Mahler was, or Ingmar Bergman; the jokes were made nonetheless. Now, TV is too eager to prioritise accessibility. Creators are adamant that viewers not be left behind – whether that’s because they’ve got one eye on their phones, or because they don’t know who Carl Jung is. What’s left is an artform that’s reluctant to look outside, an artform that’s becoming only more insular.

In their interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Affleck and Damon singled out another Netflix series, Adolescence, as being an “exception” to the rule – proof that great TV is still being made uncompromised by systemic demands. Even over the past year, there have been a number of shows that were intelligent and original, programmes designed to be watched, properly and attentively. It’s heartening that series such as Adolescence, or Pluribus, or The Chair Company, can find sizeable audiences without capitulating to the baser instincts of the streaming-era mindset. Maybe they are the exception, but it’s something, at least. At the end of the day, there’s no real long-term benefit in making TV that appeals to the uninterested. Television, in other words, doesn’t need to be stupid – let’s hope those in charge are smart enough to realise that.