# Does TV actually suck now? Canonical: https://brew.new/templates/substack/does-tv-actually-suck-now Brand: substack.com Category: newsletter ![Preview of Does TV actually suck now?](https://cdn.brew.new/email-preview-1faf63a82a51e21d-tracking_r57mwenk78ktegente11th1gq98ecfvq-1789420844025.png) ## Email content Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Does TV actually suck now? Emily Kirkpatrick posits that we, the viewers, might be the problem Emily Kirkpatrick Sep 14 ∙ Guest post READ IN APP Illustration by Mia Wu To kick off awards season, The Substack Post asked Emily Kirkpatrick, the fashion and culture writer behind I Heart Mess, whose work has appeared in The New York Times and Vanity Fair, to sound off on the state of modern entertainment. With the Emmy Awards right around the corner, the thinkpiece 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? To make my case, I first need to out myself as old. I still remember a time before streaming, when DVDs were delivered one by one via snail mail, often scratched and totally unwatchable. In fact, I remember the days before modern prestige television was even a twinkle in an HBO executive’s eye. Television was traditionally the redheaded stepchild of Hollywood, antithetical to serious thespians seeking to become global superstars. Today, those distinctions between the big and small screen no longer hold. A-list actors appear on both with no professional qualms, both formats boast multimillion-dollar blockbuster budgets, and TV has unequivocally produced some of the most enduring shows and characters of the past 25 years (Walter White, Blair Waldorf, Tony Soprano—hell, Homer Simpson). With the uptick in streaming platforms, not only can we now watch all the good new shows that are coming out, but almost every piece of television ever created. There has never been more content targeting niche interests and audience demographics. So maybe it’s not that it’s bad, but that we’re living through an unprecedented glut of content and suffering from the decision fatigue that such access entails. But let’s say you do manage to land on one of the countless award-winning programs now at your fingertips. How is your media consumption hygiene? A phone eternally glued to your hand seems like a safe bet, eyes trained on that tiny screen at least 50% of the time while your brain ricochets through to-do lists, schedules, and various AI-generated Reels. And again, why should our assessment of the quality of programming hold any weight when so many of us are spending our time supposedly watching TV by actively not watching it? In fact, if you are one of the people lamenting the suckage of modern television while also watching it with your phone permanently out, you are responsible for one of the few tangible reasons TV is worse now. Executives know the viewing public’s attention is divided at best and nonexistent at worst. It’s why they have started creating increasingly formulaic plots and heavy-handed expositional dialogue so as not to further confuse the viewer, double-fisting their remote and a heated game of Candy Crush. TV is always a reflection of its consumers. If all the shows are bad, that still represents our taste as a nation. Somewhere out there, an audience is raptly watching Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, and no amount of takedowns about why those are bad sitcoms is going to yuck that yum. TV is always a reflection of its consumers. If all the shows are bad, that still represents our taste as a nation. Our relationship to television also mirrors our current relationship to reading (stick with me for a second, I swear I’m going somewhere). In brief, we’ve become spectacularly bad at it. We’ve all seen the reports of a literacy crisis among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, who are seemingly not reading and don’t seem to understand what they’re reading when they are. As someone who publishes her writing on the internet on a daily basis, I can attest that general reading comprehension is in the trash. But what I haven’t seen addressed is how that lack of understanding and imagination impacts our understanding of theater, cinema, and other works of art, including television. Because if you can’t understand the plot line of a book, or the nuances of its character development, I won’t hold out hope that you’re going to suddenly get it when the story is acted out before you. But perhaps the ultimate culprit in our Negative Nancy attitude toward the shows we’re watching isn’t us as individual viewers but the frenetic discourse surrounding the media we consume. The moralizing, grandstanding, and standoms can quickly become deafening, and instead of turning to professional critics and other experts in their fields, more often than not, we are getting these TV talking points fed to us by faux-outraged TikTokers and some of the biggest prudes you’ve ever met in your life. Not to mention that when a piece of media, or even a concept, becomes popular now, it’s mined for content from every conceivable angle. It is impossible to simply enjoy something on its own. Anything relevant will be made viral, then made unpopular again in its suffocating ubiquity—such is the law of late-stage capitalism. So in the end, I ask again: Is it TV that sucks, or is it us? And if it’s the latter, at least that’s something we all have the power to start changing today. Want to keep the conversation going? Join Emily and a panel of fellow culture writers for more debates and hot takes as they cover the Emmy Awards live tonight, right here on Substack. A guest post by Emily KirkpatrickDon't hate me for having exquisite taste. Subscribe to Emily Like Comment Restack © 2026 Substack 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe Get the appStart writing [Open and remix this design](https://brew.new/templates/substack/does-tv-actually-suck-now) [Browse email designs](https://brew.new/browse/templates)