Rerunning on Empty One downside of being a TV nation is that, well, television is ubiquitous - it's even on the Web . More precisely, though, history has become a rerun from which we cannot awake. You may not be able to step into the same river twice, but these days it's a bit too easy to see the same episode of Mannix over and over again. The influx of repeats only confuses our already precarious notions of time and place in this world of instant history and distant present. Dr. Bellows from I Dream of Jeannie, a man forever foiled in his attempt to get to the bottom of things.
Scientists now know that reruns are depressing for a number of reasons.
On a very basic level, repeatedly watching the Sisyphean antics of common TV protagonists induces blinding moments of self-revelation. In a related way, reruns sadden us by reminding us of the gargantuan amount of human toil that goes into even the shittiest half-hour of programming. Try doing that as the credits roll by after an episode of Mama's Family. Incessant reruns also discomfit Americans like a parent embarrassing a grown child by bringing up adolescent lapses in taste. If Johnny Carson is an American institution, it seems clear that a few episodes of Carson's Comedy Classics were probably the reason that Aldrich Ames started selling secrets to the Russians.