We Now Watch TV the Way We Used to Play Music
By: Joseph Serwach
Tags: Relationships, Television, Art, Life Lessons, Music

Flashback sequence to 20 years ago:

She was a model with long flowing hair and piercing eyes, so I agreed to whatever she suggested. We rented a movie and went to her place.

We picked a film that looked great to me and very date-worthy (a Pierce Brosnan non-James Bond movie called The Tailor of Panama). As soon as the credits rolled, she started a two-hour conversation:

We “watched” the entire two-hour film as she chatted away. But we both missed every detail of the story. I never figured out what the film was about, and never saw it again because technically, we did “see” it.

I don’t remember much about the conversation either. Months passed before we tried a second date. The TV and chat definitely drowned each other out. What didn’t work then is normal 20 years later.

Today, people talk all they want: TV’s turned into “background noise’’

We now watch TV the way we used to listen to records. We play one channel with its “music,’’ theme or white noise just there in the background to break up the silence. TV is now more like elevator music used to be.

Eighty-eight percent of Americans look at “second screens’’ like a phone or tablet while watching TV, new Nielsen research shows. Modern shows are getting more simplistic to accommodate the lack of attention.

Less of a story leaves more room for commercials, after all.

After more than five years of having news channels on while writing or doing online searches, I found my “two-screen habit’’ didn’t work when I changed channels to watch 50-year-old “Adam-12” reruns or old Westerns.

Sure, I could type and watch TV simultaneously, but I’d miss most of the story, unlike the hours of cable news chatter where the same stories and issues are repeated again and again with few new details.

Cable news is kind of like a hockey game: the two sides slide around each other, but we only really start to pay attention when a big fight or comparable emotional explosions erupt on screen.

We can either focus closely on listening or half-tune-out, turning the TV into a source of “ambient noise” and “background music.’’

Not so long ago, we were transfixed by watching television

Decades ago, bars would have one TV so customers could watch “the game’’ or “the fight.” Today restaurants and bars have dozens of TVs running all sorts of shows simultaneously with the sound turned way down.

Few pay much attention. It’s just there in the background.

In 1990-96, the HBO series “Dream On,’’ told the story of Martin Tupper, a writer/editor “weaned’’ during the golden age of television when Americans stared obsessively at TV sets.

The ongoing “gag” of “Dream On’’ was that the TV had all of Martin’s attention growing up, and he would constantly “tune out’’ of his, picturing flashback scenes from TV shows he’d seen decades earlier.

In the old days, people would turn off the lights (like you do when watching a movie at the theater), and the light of the black and white set would seem to hypnotize the viewers who stared in rapt attention.

My nephew in the 1990s couldn’t sleep unless the television was kept on all night. My generation may have been the first to get “portable TV sets’’ in our bedrooms (the sets were like babysitters there to comfort and entertain us).

When there were three main networks (and a handful of local UHF stations), the competition was fierce, with each channel competing with the other. The early days of cable seemed like we’d have even more quality choices.

Somehow we went from watching three to five channels when that’s all there was to mainly decide to watch one or two channels when we had hundreds of channels to choose from. Because searching too long is too stressful?

What happens to TV post-pandemic?

Recent research by London Business School professors concludes TV viewing fills psychological needs, relaxing people and helping them escape.

Nielsen argues TV viewing had been fairly constant over the past 25 years. But interest in online options (and lockdowns) actually helped our viewership grow about 15 percent.

TV ratings went up overall during the 2020 lockdowns (mainly from people watching more news). Still, after restrictions eased, TV ratings mostly went back to normal, with higher numbers for streaming services.

And it turns out a third of Americans tell researchers the nation is now in an existential crisis because of the anxiety-driving 24/7 news cycle. So Americans fled the news channels after the election, turning to more comforting programming like binging on TV Westerns.

So TV is now like old-fashioned record players and stereos

Our old TVs had simple knobs allowing us to flip quickly between two or three choices. Modern TVs are like our old record album collections: hundreds of choices, but we instead settle on pulling one channel (or collection of content) out to “binge-watch.’’

So we watched hours (or years) of news the way we played Beatle songs back-to-back. Then we decide to binge on something totally different until we’ve heard so much of it that it can just play in the background, freeing us up to maybe even talk to each other?