Turns Out, Fighting Over the Remote Was Good for Us.

Rayah Rahman

Aug 12

3 min read

I found myself wondering the other day: why don't we have shows like Full House anymore? Those family-friendly sitcoms that had something, and someone, for everyone. From the youngest daughter with bows in her hair to the dad who prides himself on his golf swing.

I think the real answer is that, thanks to streaming and the omnipresence of devices, most of us are consuming television alone now. And so we stopped needing things that appeal to everyone, because there is no "everyone" anymore. Most of us aren't watching TV together.

Call me crazy, call me middle-aged, but remember how as a kid you'd watch TV together as a whole family? You didn't care if it was mum's weird cooking show or your older brother's sci-fi nonsense, because at least you were watching TV instead of alone in your bedroom. Sitting with your parents, sharing snacks, everyone laughing together. Eventually someone would get up and turn off the lights, and you’d settle into the couch for the night, adjusting your eyes to the single, ever-changing glow emitting from the TV.

Somewhere along the line, around 14 or 15, my mum started telling me to put my phone away while we were watching TV together. I'd roll my eyes behind her back and think, what’s the difference between me looking at my screen and you looking at that one? But as much as I hate to admit it, ‘you’ll understand when you’re older’ turned out to be true in this case. Because I thought I was just watching TV, but really, we were all watching together. Then came the phone, my own screen, and sooner or later I was watching all my shows alone, on my phone, in my room.

The thing is, watching TV with someone isn't just watching TV, it's an opportunity to share in the same experience and react to it together. This is central to families, one of the only groups of people who see each other everyday but aren't bound by shared activities. A workplace has shared tasks. Friend groups have shared hobbies. But a family is a set of parallel lives. Every day, everyone gets up and goes off to do something different: one kid's playing hopscotch in a playground, one parent's getting scolded at work while the other just got a promotion, and a moody teenager is suddenly excited about a party coming up on the weekend.

TV solved that mismatch in a surprising way. It didn't ask children to understand workplace politics, or ask a parent to fully relive what it felt like to be 15 and have your best friend host a house party. It levelled the playing field of experience down to zero and built an entire world in twenty minutes that everyone could react to at the same time.

Maybe this is a stretch, but streaming seems like soft evidence for a society obsessed with individualism. When it gave us the chance to personalise our watching, to only watch the shows that fit our own interests and hobbies, we all threw the towel in on watching the show our younger sibling was obsessed with. A show they found cool and shaped their sense of humour. We chose our own momentary pleasure over gaining an insight into the potential cultural contributions to the people we grew up with. And then we wonder how we all turned out so different, with no clue how it happened.

And sure, you could argue that not having to sit through ads right after Ross accidentally says ‘I take thee Rachel’ at the altar is a genuinely philanthropic service for all; at the rate Amazon Prime is going, I’m not sure how much longer that argument will hold up. Whatever’s left of the benefits, streaming has made us lonelier. Before streaming, every night was family movie night. The TV to a family was what a water cooler was to an office. A place of congregation. And unfortunately, I don’t think we can fully blame this one on capitalism because we all made the same choice, one remote control at a time. No one forced us.

But that's the trick of individualism: it never feels like a loss in the moment; it feels like a preference. You don't notice you've traded the family for the algorithm; you just notice that the algorithm knows you better.