America, Advertising, and Attention Spans

'Why is there nothing good on TV anymore?'

Bouncing across the Atlantic as you make your way through Netflix’s back catalogue makes the differences between US and UK TV stark. Broadly speaking, American shows live up to the negative stereotypes that the country’s entertainment industry has fostered. In competitive TV shows, presenters and talking heads remind us constantly of what’s going on, just in case we’ve drifted off in the nanosecond between frames. A hangover from aggressively commercial-ed TV, shows are made with the assumption that you’ll be watching in tiny chunks interspersed by hayfever medication ads (side effects include death), so mentally pummelled by commercials that your brain will be too damaged to remember what the point of what you’re watching is.

Watching TV when you’re actually in America is like tuning in to a non-stop advert. The actual show is barely watchable, it’s so cut up. The UK isn’t innocent, either. Returning to normal TV after watching the majority of your entertainment on streaming services makes you realise just how much time adverts take up in an hour’s slot. Usually between a fifth and a quarter of what you’re watching is ads, and generally a very small selection at that—after two episodes, you’ll be able to recite them all by heart.

Although UK shows might not assume that you’re quite as brain-dead from consumerist bombardement as their American neighbours, there are certainly more ads than there used to be. Likely a result of the pressures of streaming juggernauts and unbearable competition, old-school channels have to make their money somehow. The result of this is that shows often feel bulked out by repetition, with what little content there is rehashed after each ad break. It’s harder to get invested in something when you’re only getting it in snapshots and vox pops.

With The Great British Bake Off’s controversial move from the BBC to Channel 4 in 2017, the difference between ad-free and commercial TV became shockingly apparent. The adverts weren’t the surprise, so much as their frequency. Particularly unexpected, to me at least, was the structure that execs decided to put the show into. Like its American cousins, the show leaves us on tenterhooks between challenges, giving us a glimpse of a pastry before whisking us off to ad-land. It’s frustrating—and with the aforementioned rise of ad-free streaming services, it makes traditional TV far less appealing.

While it may seem that streaming services have benefitted from this, creating shows that actually have pacing and rhythm without constant interruption, there’s now an entirely new category of TV on offer—one that we’re not supposed to watch. It’s designed to be on in the background; not entertainment exactly, but ambient noise and light. There’s nothing really there, just the illusion of a TV show that’s made up of tiny, social-media-ready tidbits.

There have been a lot of claims that social media and the internet in general has destroyed attention spans, making people unable to focus on anything that isn’t to-the-point and bite sized. Extremely short-form comedy became mainstream with Vine, and lives on through TikTok, and Twitter is similarly deliberately limited in capacity. Entertainment has to be condensed, the set-up and punchline almost simultaneous. There’s no time for building things up, because who’s going to keep looking when quicker payoffs are available, only a click away? As a result, it’s completely normal to look at your phone while watching TV, or scrolling through Twitter with Netflix minimised in the corner of your screen. The formula for happiness is constant bursts of quickfire content.

We’ve become so accustomed to overstimulation and information coming at us from every direction that we can’t just focus on one thing at once—if we’re looking at our phones, it’s nice to have something playing in the background, no matter what it’s showing. And if the show that we’re watching reminds us of what’s happening at regular intervals then all the better; there’s no need to truly focus on any of the media we’re consuming for any length of time.

In What We Do in the Shadows, an entire subplot line centres around the idea that people don’t really watch what’s on TV. Simon the Devious (AKA the most devious bastard in Nyew Yawkh Citay) creates an entire house-flipping series with the express end goal of stealing someone’s hat. Go Flip Yourself turns a huge profit, yet no one looks closely enough at what’s going on to realise how… strange it is. The idea that TV is there for background noise is so universally accepted that it works as the basis of the plot with little further explanation needed.

I don’t want to make it sound like I’m above all this. I’ve spent afternoons browsing for something to watch, sampling films and shows five minutes at a time and tossing them aside if I’m not immediately gripped. My attention span is shot to hell, proven, perhaps, by the fact that I’m watching a video panel as I write this (or maybe that’s more of a sign that I’m not taking my job as seriously as I should). And I do find myself doing my boring admin tasks with a TV show on, my laptop making it even easier to absorb as much content as I can on a single screen.

While you scroll through your phone, with the TV burbling on ad-free beside you, episode after auto-played episode, Instagram shows you the latest trends to buy, and brands send out quirky Tweets to boost their images. Despite the meteoric impact of streaming services, we’re still being advertised to, just on different platforms. Capitalism and consumerism have just found another way to get to us, and have whittled down our attention spans to be unable to really concentrate on a single form of entertainment at a time. We live in a constantly distracting and distracted world, and to actually hold onto a single thread of media that zips past is to feel like we’re missing out on a whole bunch of spools unravelling around us.

The ad-riddled sitcoms that we became accustomed to seeing on TV, the very things that streaming services set out to eliminate with commercial-free viewing, have just been repackaged and embraced less than 20 years later. Even worse, now good TV is being pushed out in favour of background nonsense that racks up viewing figures but has little to no artistic merit.

Whatever we do, whatever way we choose to engage with television, consumerism is inescapable. The options appear to be either trudging through a haze of commercialism to wolf down a five-minute glimpse of a plot, or to have good shows briefly bankrolled by mindless nothings that serve only to provide some ambiance to our internet (window)shopping.

Is there a solution to this? Maybe not. The forces of capitalism don’t look like they’re going to crumble any time soon, and, even if they are, TV probably isn’t where the revolution will start. To distract myself from that, and to keep myself entertained until the rebellion begins, I’ll turn instead to looking for some new shoes and watching The Sandman out of the corner of my eye.

If you’re thinking “well I get out of this dichotomy if I just pirate something,” think again! Just remember how many singles there would be in your area RIGHT NOW without ad blockers.

You might also be wondering where the promised part 2 of last week’s article is. I went on a tangent while writing it and this is what I ended up with. I am never promising a follow-up again.