Smarter TVs, Dumber Viewers

Earl Fowler

Remember how our parents used to nag at us about how spending too much time in front of the idiot box would rot our little brains?

Well, it wasn’t like we were perusing the Classics Illustrated version of War and Peace or solving quadratic equations in our heads or anything, but at least we could follow the straightforward plots of Dennis the Menace and Bonanza.

While spending the holiday season with my grandkids, it was brought home to me yet again that a diminished ability to concentrate on TV shows while people are simultaneously mesmerized by their cellphones has taken brain rot to a whole new level.

I almost caught myself admonishing the kids to pay closer attention to the big screen so they wouldn’t miss so much of what was going on — the exact opposite of our parents’ harangues!

Alors.

If you’ve wondered lately about the deplorable lack of subtlety in modern television programming, and the tedious tendency to over-explain what we just witnessed, the explanation is obvious: cellphones are mind parasites. And slavish, slack-jawed devotion to YouTube streaming, Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat and the whole unsavoury lot is making people too simple to follow what used to be considered simply stupid.

And this is in no way limited to kids.

Contemporary television arrives pre-chewed, like baby food for adults who insist on eating while jogging on a treadmill while also texting while also, somehow, watching the show itself. Characters no longer just do things; they announce that they are doing them, explain why they are doing them, and then — just in case you missed it while doomscrolling — recap what they have done in a tone usually reserved for airline safety videos. (“As you can see, I am betraying you now. This is betrayal. Betrayal is bad.”)

This is not because writers suddenly forgot how implication works, or because producers woke up one morning and decided that subtlety was elitist. It’s because the average viewer’s attention now behaves less like a spotlight and more like a strobe light operated by a distracted raccoon. The narrative must therefore be robust enough to survive repeated blackouts. Plot points are padded, motivations are redundantly underlined and emotional beats are replayed like instant replays in sports, minus the pleasure of watching athletic grace and competence.

(Why do I suddenly get the sense that I’m mansplaining my mansplaining? Maybe there’s a future for me in TV scriptwriting after all, despite those sarcastic rejection letters you sent me, Mr. Bigshots Alan Brady and Mel Cooley.)

What’s especially grimly funny is that we still feel busy while watching. We’re not just consuming entertainment; we’re multitasking, which is the adult version of telling yourself you’re being productive while reorganizing your sock drawer instead of answering emails. The phone vibrates, the show drones on, the brain skims both, and afterward we retain neither but maintain a strong emotional conviction that we have been “engaged” for several hours. Engaged with what remains unclear. The void, most likely. An infinite expanse of existential nothingness with no discernible boundaries or contents.

And so the culture responds rationally, if depressingly: shows get louder, brighter, faster and more explicit — blasted with a sound bar capable of registering on Mongolian seismographs — like someone trying to explain a joke to a person wearing noise-cancelling headphones by yelling and using interpretive dance.

Nothing can be trusted to land the first time. Everything must be reiterated, reinforced and occasionally spelled out using musical cues that suggest how you should be feeling right now, in case your feelings app failed to load.

Which inevitably brings us back to the old parental fear of brain rot, which turns out not to have been wrong so much as quaintly incomplete. The brain hasn’t rotted; it’s been fragmented, its attention span diced into app-sized cubes and scattered across the day.

The tragedy is not that we can’t handle sophisticated storytelling anymore, but that we rarely give it enough uninterrupted minutes to prove that we still can.

The idiot box, it turns out, was only warming us up for the miracle of being distracted everywhere, all the time, forever.

Our parents’ admonition — “Turn off the idiot box and read a book” — is not a realistic injunction to issue to barely literate generations who find it unpleasant or downright impossible to focus on anything with more than 280 characters. (And by characters, we’re referring here to letters and numerals, not the cast of Middlemarch).

The curtailment of our ability to concentrate by the proliferation of habit-forming, compelling, compulsive, soothing, hypnotizing, narcotic, soporific, opiate, meth-like gadgetry adds up to just one thing: Subtraction by ADDition. Hence Trump. Hence Putin. Hence the Descent of Man … and not in the Darwinian sense. There is no grandeur in this life of viewing.

We are idiots, babe. It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.