I Miss Casual TV the Way I Miss Casual Friendships

The fatigue of keeping up with "Appointment TV" is starting to feel like the fatigue of keeping up with everything else.

At some point in the future, posts like this will probably be paid posts. Because I was born with the brain of a creative and we’re epigenetically predisposed towards poverty, it hurts me a little to think of people wanting to read stuff I’ve written and not being able to. So for now we’ll operate on the freemium model (in which people pay for the vague promise of more content). Rest assured that I’m working to overcome this affliction.

Paramount

Now that I’m a fully-fledged, indisputably adult American complete with kids and a mortgage, the thing I miss the most isn’t necessarily my youth or the ability to have beer and pizza without getting heartburn, it’s casual friendships. For most of my life, I had a big circle of people I considered “friends” who I didn’t necessarily have on speed dial. They were just people I’d see in class, guys I played rugby with, other stand-up comedians, regulars at my favorite bar, etc.

We didn’t need to keep close tabs on each other because we had a reasonable expectation that we’d see each other every week. These are the kinds of people you wouldn’t necessarily just call up for a lunch date, but who would probably come to your funeral if you died, or help you in some way if you suddenly needed it. The further along into adulthood you get, it seems like the harder it is to have those kinds of casual friendships. Once you have kids to take care of and dinner to prepare, and family activities on the weekends, and blah blah blah, a lot of those opportunities for “casual hangs” dry up. Doubly so if you have a “remote job,” like I and so many people do these days, which mostly involve just being wherever you are and sending various forms of emails from time to time. Familiar faces become frequent contacts and Slack avatars, which are casual friends up to a point, but a little different.*

Maintaining friendships these days seems to involve a lot of separate, individually directed acts of touching base or catching up**. It’s a higher bar of attention and intentionality — sort of like the difference between asking someone out or just expecting to see them at a party. The opportunities for blanket check-ins across a group of peers become fewer.

Television weirdly seems to have begun to mirror this phenomenon in the streaming era. There used to be a centralized place to go and see all your imaginary friends, be it on the DVR, scrolling the guide screen, or just flipping channels (remember the concept of “flipping channels??”). These days, watching television feels like an act of trying to remember old friends, followed by a triage of sorts as you try to decide who to catch up with first. With so much remembering and prioritizing, it’s much less of a casual hang.

There used to be a phrase in the entertainment industry. When a show was good, people would describe it as “appointment TV.” As in, you knew when it was on and you made an appointment to watch it at that exact time (it seems so temporary and ephemeral now, doesn’t it? If you missed it back then you just missed it). The DVR took the precarity out of that situation, probably for the best, such that all you had to do was program your favorite shows into it and then watch them at your leisure. Streaming sold the promise of making this process even easier, even more “frictionless,” as Jeff Bezos loves to call it. Now you didn’t even need to program a DVR, you could watch virtually any show at virtually any time.

This goal, of making an easy thing even easier, has ironically only made it… well, if not harder, at least more stressful. So many nights I’ve sat there staring dumbly at my Roku’s home screen, trying to remember what shows I’ve been watching and which app hosts them (which actually change or disappear from time to time, but that’s a different story). While it’s true that I’ve undoubtedly gotten older and dumber and my memory has surely declined in tandem with my ability to digest spicy foods in the years since the heyday of DVR, but we were never before asked to remember and prioritize BRANDS. You just turned on the DVR and the shit you liked was there, or you flipped through channels until you found it. To belabor the metaphor, you might’ve had to scan the room, but you didn’t have to make a phone call.

“All options available always” now just means you reexperience the stress of filtering anew every time you log on. All TV is “appointment TV” now, in the sense that you don’t just happen across it while wandering by, you have to have a specific intention and act on it.

Accordingly, all TV shows now strive to be as talked and written about as, say, Succession. This in the hopes that you’ll make a specific trip to a specific app to catch up with their show just to avoid feeling left out. In this mental triage we do every time we fire up the streaming box — what was I watching? what was that show Dave was telling me he thought I’d love? which one did the Atlantic describe as the official dating show of hot boy summer? — we naturally tend to prioritize the “important” shows.

What this essay presupposes is… maybe TV shows aren’t supposed to be important? Maybe feeling important is contrary to the entire idea of TV. Like friends, we don’t really just see shows casually anymore, we have to take specifically directed steps to seek them out specifically. This process of re-remembering, re-filtering, re-sorting in order of importance… all of it has made watching TV feel suspiciously like doing homework. TV used to be the thing I did to avoid doing homework. What used to be a procrastination enabler now has a tendency to feel like a necessary process of “catching up.”

Maybe this is just the natural arc of technology. All of the things that were supposed to make our lives easier and give us more leisure time instead just end up creating greater expectations of all the things we’re supposed to be able to accomplish in the course of a day. The easier technology has made it to “catch up,” the more things we’re expected to be caught up with, always.

In some tangential way, I think this is what the writer and actor strikes are about. Once upon a time, if you wrote or acted in a show like Cheers, that everyone was talking about, you could expect to be, basically, set for life. There were numbers used to reflect how many people were watching and reasonably stable measures of how valuable those eyeballs were, and a person involved could expect to share in that value. Now we mostly have streaming services’ self-reported numbers, of how many people they claim are watching each show, mostly counted with the goal of making the share prices go up. They’re selling the promise of future value.

Likewise, if you’re on Succession (which we all know is just the most written-about show and almost certainly not the most-watched show), you’re not set for life. You probably don’t even get a bonus unless the honcho of whatever streaming service you’re on decides to give you one out of the goodness of their heart. Mostly you just get the vaguely defined benefits of being “known” now, which carries with it the expectation of more work, and another vague promise of future value.

The labor strikes in entertainment feel like an attempt to force the people in charge of streaming to re-engineer a new system in which Cheers could exist. It’s almost as hard to imagine a new Cheers on TV, as TV currently exists, as it is to imagine a new reality where a show like Cheers would still reflect real life. Because what is Cheers? It’s a show about a group of people having a casual hang. That it depicts a world that’s so universally attractive to us (despite looking ever more exotic) is probably a big reason why the jokes still hold up even when the clothes and hairstyles are comically anachronistic. Norm and Carla probably don’t know each other’s phone numbers, but they’re still important to each other.

Privatizing the “airwaves” and the economy didn’t just alter business, it altered society. We’ve all become a little more private, the hangs atomized and individualized to a degree that they require a little more energy and a little more attention. The more things are a business, the fewer things are allowed to be casual. Don’t we ever get to just veg out and slack off? People need things in their life that aren’t “important.”

Bring back casual TV. Bring back the casual hang.

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*People who go to church regularly have it a little easier. I don’t have much desire to watch my neighborhood’s most over-familiar guy deliver his interpretations of three-thousand-year-old, thrice-translated religious texts in the form of a one-man show, but the idea of “fellowship” does make a lot of sense. And maybe that’s all it was supposed to be; just a standing date to see some people. Maybe that’s all it should be?

**The group text is the most recognizable way we’ve tried to re-engineer casual hangs. Ideally you catch up with people on your group texts who you don’t necessarily text individually that much. It’s a lower bar, just like group hangs used to be. I think this is why we’re seeing all these articles now about how “Gen Z hates Android phones” and the like. Apple shrewdly engineered it so that Android phones fuck up the group chat, and now that the group chat has become the casual hang, that’s a big deal.