I found out recently that my partner was "listening" and half looking at a TV show while preparing herself for work. I was quite surprised and asked her if she had run out of podcasts but she told me that show was so addictive she preferred running it in the background than waiting for it. It obviously made her inefficient at everything, preparing herself and following the show.
I've often found most US TV shows were overexplaining everything already. Maybe I have an higher cultural, technical and medical knowledge than the baseline of US TV viewers but lots of dialogs are already filled with what feels to me as unneeded explanations in general that would feel completely weird in a real life dialog.
I am like the opposite of the binge watcher, after one, two episodes at the maximum, I just want to do something else. It works well with my habit of watching movies and TV shows on a projector as it has a kind of ritual to it, you shut off the blinders, turn on the projector and sit comfortably on the sofa. My partner often do not understand how I can I just say "that's it, let's do something else" and shut off the beamer when the show obviously make sure it ends the episode with a moment of uncertaincy/suspense.
Binge the next season of "Ow! My balls!", now on Netflix!
I just fell out a window and am on my way down! I sure hope I don't straddle that sawhorse when I land... Ow! My balls!!
(canned laughter)
I think the silver lining in our modern content flood is that zoomers are unabashed about admitting that slop is slop and that they like slop. Second screen is convenient jargon that lets people pretend like braindead content is novel just because the use case has changed.
It's personally dissatisfying that Netflix has been in the slop business for a number of years now, but there was always a limit to how far they would get without focusing on slop as a business model. They just had to be a more prestigious brand for a while first to get established.
Soon Netflix will have Subway Surfers running alongside the movie.
My new Netflix show is an endless loop of toasters with wings flying through space. There will also be bread doing some flying.
Telenovelas were always the thing. They are what they are because they were designed to be watched while doing other things without feeling regret when the other thing requires attention.
Are you writing this, or is it the evil twin you never knew you had, who was dead and buried but came back to life to take your place with the help of your spouse who was plotting behind your back?
Telenovelas and soap operas are cheap to produce. Netflix meanwhile raises prices every year.
My mum watches the art form of cliche plots of first person AI narration with AI generated imagery. She always watched movies in bits and pieces on TV (also watched Gone with the Wind and other long movies in one sitting) so she would have appreciated "LoFi tv" forever.
So back to old TV? Pre-internet old TV series were always slow and clear enough to allow you to follow them even if you were paying half attention
For this exact reason, I have an Android TV box with a 1TB USB stick that plays TV shows from the 90s and 2000s on shuffle. As most of those shows are in 480p resolution max, you can store a lot with 1TB.
When I was a child I looked down on my mom for watching crap.
Later I realised that as a therapist she just wanted to shut her brain off after dealing with incest stories all day long.
The tiktok-ification of netflix is coming. Good. Let the internet burn so we can start over.
It's the opposite. Episodes are lengthened with plot points being repeated through dialogue. Hour-long TV shows were really 40 minutes due to advertising, meanwhile on Netflix they are 50-plus minutes. Longer shows = more watch time recorded, which is Netflix's main KPI. Tiktok and others get long watch times because it's more like flipping through channels.
6 month old article (pulled from recent discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567683 ?), lots of discussion on the source:
Casual Viewing – Why Netflix looks like that
This is a pathetic example of what happens when entire generations are attention-starved from never not having a screen in front of them...
Note that you're describing all generations from Gen-X onwards. Old folks are just as much infected with this brainrot nowadays.
Gen Z as well, I'm not excluding anybody in this
My dad used to come home from work and park his butt in front of the tv the whole evening. He still does that, except he’s on his phone now. Not a massive difference.