When I’m surfing Netflix or Paramount+ or Disney+ or HBO MAX or Tubi or Rainbow Unicorn 9000 for all I care, stuck in a loop of things I’ve vaguely heard about but cannot fathom why anyone would be interested in, I think about the state of things and sigh with ennui.

Have you noticed what’s happened to TV in the era of streaming subscriptions? Surely you must have. Shows are somehow longer and shorter than ever before; that is to say, episodes stretch on for hours, but seasons are compressed within an inch of their lives. Six episodes constitute a season. Entire series release at once. This wreaks havoc on pacing; it feels like you’ve got no time to understand things, no space to breathe. I’ll use the metaphor of food to illustrate my point: rather than being fed to you at a reasonable pace which allows you to experience the flavors and digest before you’re ready for more, information is crammed down your throat as if it were no better than pig slop.

Oh, let’s be clear, there’s been “trash TV” for as long as there’s been TV. Reality shows, game shows, televised talent shows, all of these may justifiably be called trash TV. Soap operas in particular are famous (or infamous) for their ability to “suck you in” without you even noticing–at least, not until you’ve missed a History project deadline because you spent seven hours watching Days Of Our Lives last night and Dr. Dunn is giving you the stink eye. Yes, there’s always been trash, but I don’t think there’s ever been this sort of slop before. The types of TV I listed before, no matter how hollow or fluffy or overblown, were all made with the intent of being enjoyed. If not by you, then certainly by someone. That’s the entire point behind “fanbases”, right? A bunch of people who like a show enough to talk about it and form a community, even if you’re not in it? But these sorts of shows, too short and too long, too heavy and yet possessing no substance, have no chance of forming fanbases. Why? Simple: this sort of content isn’t meant to be engaged with! Netflix has admitted they structure their content with the assumption you’ll be looking at your phone while it’s on! You aren’t supposed to watch the show! You’re just supposed to… Have it on the screen. It’s the logic of elevator music, but with video.

Television hasn’t always been like that. From its invention in the 50s up toward Netflix’s popularization in the 2010s, TV was structured around time slots and incremental releases. More was expected of the viewer; they had to know when a show was on, know what channel it would be on (and if their cable plan carried it), remember what happened in the last episode, watch it all the way through, and then wait until the next episode, which could take up to a week to air. This is why so many pre-streaming TV shows, especially serial shows like E.R, Stargate SG-1 and even some anime like Dragon Ball Z had segments in the beginning catching the viewer up on what happened before. Because there was a considerable amount of time between episodes!

To the average viewer now, this may all seem like torture. All that waiting for just one episode? Not even several? Just one, every so often? And you had to keep track of when it was on or you would have to buy it later? You couldn’t just watch it all anytime you wanted?

Yes! And you know what? All that waiting was a good thing! 

I bring it back to my earlier point: pacing. This structure allowed shows to develop their characters over multiple seasons as opposed to a few episodes. It allowed viewers to ease into the world a show was trying to create, rather than forcing them through it on a light speed rail. By season 3 of Star Trek: Voyager, you’ve seen the crew from lots of different angles, you’ve learned about them and how they act and think. You’ve had time to sit with them and figure them out slowly. Major mysteries could take entire seasons to be solved, big threats felt menacing because you explicitly couldn’t get rid of them in an episode, a couple might take weeks in real-life time to get together. This gave viewers time to breathe, to digest and reflect.

Not so in this era. More and more shows are made faster and faster, compressed further and further, and we end up with a story flayed to the bone. Too much filler will annoy and bog down, yes, but not enough robs the viewer of any deep revelation about the world or characters. The culprit seems to me to be binge-watching. Shows like Supernatural technically can be binged. You can binge watch anything. But these “slop” shows are designed to be binged, to be watched all at once and then never again. You get all you can out of a single viewing, like squeezing the juice from a lemon, and then you toss it into the trash and don’t look at it again. “Slop” is by definition unwatchable a second time. There’s no more to learn, no more to see, no more questions to ask. “Slop” is one-time-use.

And have I mentioned the advertisements? Back in, say, the 80s, you paid more for channels like HBO because they never showed advertisements. Now it seems that not only do streaming services cost about as much as a cable plan did (discrediting the argument that streaming is vastly cheaper than cable), they have even more ads! And on older shows, ones that were designed to have a specific number of commercial breaks in specific places, like Happy Days or MacGyver, the ads are awkwardly shoehorned into places they weren’t meant to be. The show I’m invested in just becomes a vehicle for other people to hawk products at me. Ads are always disappointing when you’re interested in a show, but that actually makes me mad. It feels like there’s nowhere I can go where someone isn’t aggressively selling me something, not even a nice evening watching attractive monster hunters in a cool car.

There have been good things about the streaming model. You get to pick and choose what you want to watch, not just taking everything with a given channel. If you really want a certain show, it’s easier to find than ever. And there have been some truly excellent shows produced by the streaming model: Arrested Development, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Stranger Things, Heartstopper, BoJack Horseman, I could go on. But if we want more of these shows, and maybe some even better shows, we have to say enough with the slop.