With the Emmy Awards right around the corner, the think-piece industrial complex on the modern state of television has hit a fever pitch. The predominant theme of these hot takes seems to be that it’s time to sound the death knell for quality programming.
It’s true we are officially living in the brain rot era—a time when slop reigns supreme, and our attention spans have never been shorter. A time when a frighteningly large segment of the population would prefer to watch a two-hour movie broken up across 100 TikToks played at 2x speed rather than sit their butts down in a physical theater. But even so, I would like to offer my own counterargument on modern entertainment, which is that these postmortems are just the latest in the premature eulogies we’ve been reading for centuries about every form of content we consume and the new mediums through which we consume them. Plus, Walter Benjamin really already said all there is to be said on the topic in 1936: “The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated… that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”
We have been on the precipice of entertainment’s total collapse since its invention, and yet, miraculously, we continue to be entertained. But there’s a more salient question that this debate raises: Is TV bad now, or are we all just bad at watching it? Read more >
