Falling Asleep with the TV On
You can try to log off but the slop will follow you
Among the mixed rewards of a lifetime of TV watching are the throwaway moments that unexpectedly stay with you decades later, a joke or an image or an anecdote buried in the middle of some talk show or the endless churn of MTV or ESPN, never to be seen again, impossible to find even if you tried, and likely remembered only by you—not important enough to keep circulating on YouTube or ever resurface on a streaming platform or even as a meme. You probably don’t even remember what you saw correctly yourself but that’s fine, yours is now the real version. When TV was the primary entertainment option we retained more, voluntarily or not, because there was less to displace what we absorbed, disposable though it usually was. Now it’s the opposite: Content lingers indefinitely on the platforms that host it, but we forget it quickly.
Someone who exemplified this phenomenon was Norm Macdonald, whose legacy survives more in those mundane TV moments than in his official filmography (even his SNL presence feels closer to the former). Talk show routines always seemed to provide the perfect backdrop to his comedic style, eliciting what in retrospect were many of his best performances—the duller the better, like this guest spot on The View. Much of this has since been harvested from the scrap heap of TV ephemera and immortalized on YouTube, but plenty more has not.
One of these Norm Macdonald moments I remember but will probably never find is a talk show appearance—Conan or Letterman— that must have been sometime in 2001, shortly after the cancellation of his unsuccessful sitcom, The Norm Show. In the interview, Norm explains how even the least popular shows on network television would get credit for something like a million viewers, because so many households just leave their TVs on all the time regardless of whether anyone was actually watching. I believe the host had been trying to reassure him that The Norm Show wasn’t a complete failure; not only did Norm reject this comfort, but explained why most shows were doing worse than the numbers suggested, and why many complete failures looked slightly better than they were.
I’m reminded of this anecdote lately because so much of culture feels like what Norm Macdonald described: a TV that someone left on in the other room with nobody watching it, generating inflated metrics that will justify increased output of similar material. Facebook has felt this way for years, and Instagram has started to more recently. “Screen time,” as a concept, contains multitudes; the most significant feature of the contemporary feed is not the algorithmic black box that curates what appears, but the more straightforward autoplay feature, which ensures that TikToks and Instagram stories keep going until you actively stop them. Your attention, a harder thing to quantify, doesn’t really matter. If you fall asleep as the content keeps flowing, even better.
NETFLIX AS FURNITURE
No platform illustrates the cultural implications of autoplay more vividly than Netflix, as Will Tavlin describes in a recent n+1 essay about the evolution of the company’s business model and its impact on the film industry as it has grown more dominant. The depressing arc of the narrative is tempered by a grim humor, enabled by the author’s willingness to trudge through the fetid swamp of Netflix’s lesser-known library and retrieve some of its obscure artifacts:
“As the years went on, the streamer picked up lifeless vehicles for A-list talent like The Polka King, a comedy starring Jack Black as Jan Lewan, the real-life Polish immigrant and polka band leader who launched a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme; preposterous directorial feature-length debuts like Brie Larson’s Unicorn Store, a fantasy-comedy starring Larson as a failing artist who learns that unicorns are real and that Samuel L. Jackson wants to sell her one; and found-object curios not worth remembering, like the 2016 biopic Barry, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as Barack Obama’s white college girlfriend.”
Netflix’s model, Tavlin explains, is to amass a high volume of content in order to drive subscriber acquisition. Because customers subscribe to Netflix in the aggregate, no individual title matters much beyond its infinitesimal contribution to the size of the platform’s overall library. (I wrote about this aspect of streaming platforms for Real Life back in 2018—how they encourage us to watch the platform itself rather than individual movies and shows.)
The result, as Tavlin repeatedly points out, is that films acquired or produced by Netflix simply vanish, sinking into the content sludge where they become another difficult-to-spot thumbnail on an endless menu. “Netflix, uniquely, seemed to relish making its films vanish as soon as they were released, dumping them onto its platform and doing as little as possible to distinguish one from the next.”