Phoebe Pascoe defends our collective indulgence in “mindless” programming

Studying English has given me a newfound fear. Reading such prodigious books for my course has made me implicitly aware of how many I will not get around to in my lifetime, possible favourites among them. But, rather than racing home to read Dostoyevsky every day, I find myself returning from campus to my friends’ sofa, and snuggling down with a cup of tea (or, more likely, a G&T) to watch what is generally considered trash TV. In the past few months we have watched it all, from Sex and the City: The Movie to Wizards of Waverly Place to an endless string of rom-coms. So, why do so many of us succumb to the urge to watch such utter rubbish?

People often defend their watching of reality TV by calling it “mindless” – it helps them switch off from the ever-exhausting world. This is not my experience with ‘low-brow’ shows and films. Watching them is an ultra-marathon. I say this because it probably requires roughly the same lung capacity, so little do we pause to breathe whilst screaming at the television (and each other). In tutorials, I am used to stating my opinions with a caveat: “I think,” “this might just be me, but…” These phrases do not exist in the realm of my friends’ kitchen. We express our opinions on characters as if they are facts enshrined in the scripts of the shows we are watching. Confronted with a text for a difficult module, I approach it with the expectation that there might be parts I do not grasp, allusions which elude me. With trashy TV, we are all expert critics. 

80s rom-coms or shows like Friends are often called ‘comfort movies/TV’ as if they provide the emotional security of a big bowl of pesto pasta, or your dad’s old jumper. But, they can also confront us. Watching the Sex and the City movie, we couldn’t help but recoil at some blatantly misogynistic jokes. Yet, even as we winced, we leaned in. We talked about how that misogyny made sense for that character, or where we still see that sentiment now. We spoke about how it felt to see characters we otherwise love express such opinions, and what it meant for us to be watching it. 

Obsessing over two dimensional TV characters and objectively awful scripts does not take away the joy that brilliantly written, nuanced literature brings me. Talking about the texts I am studying with friends from different courses enhances my love for these works but, so does ranting with them about completely different media. Analysing the metaphors of Gilmore Girls with others is a space where our completely ridiculous but utterly enthused opinions are taken seriously (if only to be vehemently disagreed with). Safe in this knowledge, I feel able to approach more ‘high-brow’ subject matter from more unusual viewpoints than I would have before.

I have seen this confidence in others, too. Mostly girls. It is incredible how much of my small talk with other women during the winter months revolves around the TV show Gilmore Girls. It is an easy way of bypassing inane conversation – there are only so many times you can ask what course someone is doing – and immediately being engrossed in a passionate back and forth. There are also low stakes. My conversations with new friends are not confined to low-rent TV, far from it. But, when you spend your adolescence being quizzed by boys on any sport, film or band that you claim to have seen (I was once asked to list the rankings of Formula 1 drivers to prove I had watched a race), having something you know you can wax on about endlessly and intensely, without being caught out, is freeing. 

I cherish not only the content, but the manner of these conversations. Just because I’ve been talking about how my opinions can be bolstered by discussions with friends, doesn’t mean that my takes on various characters aren’t also constantly disputed. When discussing a TV show we all have extreme, ardent opinions, but these are also changeable. I often find myself convinced of my stance on a character, then swayed five minutes later by a friend’s remarkable observation. Swapping opinions today can feel hard to do, especially if you choose to preserve them on twitter or a group chat. I think there is a lot we can learn from our conversations around low-rent media. They are not just a way of unwinding so that we can progress to more important conversations; the pillars of these discussions are unexpectedly fruitful in other areas of our lives. That said, it might be a good idea to hesitate before screaming “men are trash” at someone in the street, like my friend has taken to shouting at her TV (and occasionally whatever flatmate is nearest).

So, what if focusing on the trivial with as much fervour as we do actually gives us a renewed approach to more significant matters? I would argue that these shows don’t switch our brains off, they just activate them in a different way. It’s like stretching: sometimes a necessary precursor to a workout, and other times just pleasant in and of itself. 

Books like Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 associated watching too much TV with a dystopian downfall of humanity (including the downfall of literature). Of course, some media is simply mindless, and we should round out our consumption of it with a more balanced diet, but I don’t think we should criticise ourselves for giving it our attention. Quoting Sally Rooney in a column for a Trinity publication is a little on the nose, but I’m going to anyway. She wrote of our guilty obsession with trivialities that: “if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? […] Because we loved each other too much and we found each other too interesting.” So, going forward, I will refuse to apologise for loving awful media “too much”, and finding my friends’ takes on them “too interesting”. I might end up knowing far too much about the Sex and the City reboot and never finishing War and Peace, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.