2025 Retrospective: Do I Like Television Anymore?

Back in the day, I believed in television as a breakthrough medium. During my youth, it shed its goo-goo ga-ga machine reputation to become the unifying fascination of the very online cultural critics of my formative years. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about television. One could say it was something of a special interest of mine.

In October, I gave away all my theory books about television.

Television Feels Tiresome These Days

We may debate the value of artistic formalism and its relationship to political rightness, but if you asked me what tortures me the most about television in the streaming era, it is the lack of form. Television was, at its height, the product of rigid standards of length and seriality. “Your seasonal allowance is exactly 22 episodes of either 22 or 45 minutes, depending on whether you are comedy or drama: fill them.” Streaming shows today feel like battling an enormous Jello or king cake. I am digging for the nuggets embedded within the scudge, but the returns diminish rapidly.

There are always more streaming shows, every time I open the cursed apps, and fewer and fewer of them do I want to watch. Nothing makes good leverage of television’s serial format anymore, because most streaming shows are heaps of moments into which are nested two or three scenes of import or interest. These will be clipped for YouTube and TikTok, giffed for Tumblr, and ingested there over and over. The rest is shrimp shell.

Less than shrimp shell, really. You can use shrimp shell to make seafood broth.

I miss episodes which were good or bad. Noticeable variations in quality indicate the influence of actual writers, the development of craft and characters, the search for tone, the scramble to meet deadlines. I miss the thrill of threads, planned and emergent, coming together in conclusive statements which tie up the ends of seasons. I miss the time of year when the shows came back all at once in an abundance of riches.

I am getting too old for this.

I tire of the labor of collating recommendations from NPR, Slate, The New Yorker, and all the other pop culture direction-engines which weigh upon my lib’s heart. The work isn’t worth it. I shouldn’t have to heist out mere nuggets of entertainment by scaling the impenetrable walls of apps with user experiences so bad as to be fortress-like.

I am not immune to bullshit! I watched many episodes of 90-Day Fiance! But I won’t work for it. I cannot be made to work for it. In the next life, I will be subscribing to Mubi, Kanopy, and nothing else. 

I’ll watch Tubi too, but I won’t tell them my email address.

Actually, Forget Television

You know what ripped this year? A website called “radio.garden". You spin a 3D globe around in your browser and land on a green dot. The green dot represents one or more radio stations into which you--yes you--may tune. 

I’ve been listening to a great deal of Frogtown Community Radio out of Saint Paul, Minnesota. They will let pretty much anyone have their own show and that ROCKS. You might think “But anyone can have their own show: it’s called YouTube.” On YouTube you’re a supplicant of the algorithm. On Frogtown Radio you are a stealth predator waiting for some out-of-town fool to drive through downtown Saint Paul with their radio accidentally tuned to 94.1 FM. 

Various people who are the walking equivalent of a pus-smeared dickhole--many of them in charge of the literal government--want to convince you that they’re the suppressed voices the mainstream media doesn’t want you to hear. Tune into Frogtown Radio and hear from the actual people those aforementioned g-man shitweasels are trying to destroy. The human voice cannot only belong to the bipedal equivalent of a moldy bologna sandwich ranting about blood and oil on the TV; the human voice remains a weapon and a joy in the hands of advocates, teachers, families, friends, neighbors, victims, organizers, and everyone else. That's why it's community radio.

Anyway

Here’s the 2025 television shows I could think of. I did watch them all.

1. Most Enjoyed By Me: Resident Alien Season 4. You already heard this story in another blog post. It’s still true.
2. Most Formally Admirable to Me: The Pitt Season 1. You will hear about this in a 2026 blog post. No spoilers but it involves Bertolt Brecht.
3. Most “Alien Time”: Pluribus Season 1. Not just a time when aliens are around, but a time in which humanity has become alienated from itself by late techno-capitalism. We’ll discuss this more if I ever post my Level Red X-Files Theory.
4. Most Moving Cartoon Family: Long Story Short. This was such a nice show because it had strongly differentiated episodes building serially to a climactic final installment. This final installment paid off because we understood the characters on a deep level produced by our repeated encounters with them in varied situations.
5. Most Not in LA or NYC: The Lowdown. You love to see it (any images of people living their lives outside LA or NYC which are not produced by Taylor Sheridan).
6. Most Sand Moved: Physical: Asia. I decided to become a gym chad this year, so now I love watching people move heavy objects. Boy, did they move some heavy objects on this show!
7. Most Grandpa Goes to School: Man on the Inside Season 2. He was a grandpa and this season he went to school instead of the nursing home, which is a rare and happy trajectory for an old man to take.
8. Most Humorous Substance Abuse Scene: The Studio Season 1. Remembering that sequence still makes me teehee to this day.
9. Most Supposed to Be Show of the Year, but TBH I Kinda Forgot About It: Andor Season 2. Yeah, okay, but it’s the truth. I have not really thought about it since springtime. Call me a failed lib, but there it is.
10. Most Muttonchops: Death By Lightning. I think Nick Offerman took the role of Chester Arthur specifically to get to wear them. He is the only actor in our time who could pull them off with true panache.

I can no longer recommend television as a concept, though. Sometimes I sit and look out the window for twenty-two unbroken minutes, and it’s almost as good.