Welcome To The Era Of Junk Food TV

It happens all the time. I’m on the couch, staring at a screen, waiting for something to catch my eye. Before I know it, the sun has long since set, and I’ve spent hours mindlessly watching content just entertaining enough to hold my attention.

No, I wasn’t scrolling my TikTok For You page or YouTube Shorts — I was watching television.

These days, viewers are wasting an inordinate amount of time with shows they recognize aren’t good, interesting, or even enjoyable — and afterward, feeling unmoved or even guilty for rotting away on the sofa. (An elevated form of bed rot, if you will.) While many are used to experiencing social media this way, it’s starting to apply to how we consume Hollywood entertainment, too.

“It's like, you get this bag of chips, and it's your favorite flavor, but you open the bag, and most of it is air, and there's only this little bit at the bottom. You're left wanting more, and there's just nothing else there,” says TV critic Kit Stone. “And so then you wonder, like, what was the point?” Welcome to the era of junk food TV.

While there’s always been trash TV (exploitative, overly melodramatic), comfort TV (older, nostalgic), and more recently, mid TV (highly produced but lackluster), junk food TV is distinguished by how it’s consumed: It’s the shows, new and old, that are served to you by an algorithm trained on your past preferences, and auto-played at every possible juncture, like the enticing candy section at practically every store’s checkout aisle.

TikTok’s algorithm is notorious for effectively coaxing people to spend more time on it, largely by intuiting what users want, and streaming platforms are aiming for the same thing.

Netflix’s algorithms, for example, give the streamer granular insight into your TV choices, analyzing how you navigate its menus and which shows you bypassed, stopped to preview, and ultimately clicked on and watched. For instance, if you love Bridgerton and rewatched Season 2, don’t be too surprised if the new season of Heartstopper appears on your homepage with an image of Bridgerton star Jonathan Bailey to lure you in — even though his role is more of a cameo.

The stage was set for junk food TV when Netflix pioneered the model for marathon-watching, dropping full seasons instead of one episode at a time, and eliminating natural pauses like ad breaks. At first, it felt like an overabundance of quality since it coincided with the Peak TV era, which gave us prestige offerings like Mad Men and Game of Thrones. While that time has passed (The Perfect Couple is no Big Little Lies), marathoning is still as popular as ever. People lap up shows that are easy to half-watch — or at least, they spend more time watching them, and that’s the metric the streamers are tracking.

“TV has become as ephemeral as the last five videos you swiped on TikTok, or the last bag of chips you forgot you already ate.”

How you spend that precious time reportedly plays a role in which shows are greenlit, renewed, or canceled. Streamers have even given notes to writers to make shows more “second screen” — “easier to follow while sending an email or scrolling through Instagram,” as Justine Bateman told the Hollywood Reporter. Sabrina Carpenter even jokes about it in her Netflix Christmas special, thanking the audience for “half-watching a big screen while scrolling through social media on a smaller screen.”

This trend has only been exacerbated by TV’s increasingly short lifespan, thanks to the popularity of limited series, and the fact that most new shows are canceled after a season or two. It dissuades audiences from getting too invested in what they’re watching and ultimately incentivizes people to stick to safe options — either old, nostalgic TV or shows they don’t care about enough to get emotionally invested in. TV has become as ephemeral as the last five videos you swiped on TikTok, or the last bag of chips you forgot you already ate.

The secret is that as much as viewers are teaching platforms about their tastes, the platforms are also training audiences. It ties in with the “revealed preference” theory — consumers reveal their true preferences by their purchasing habits, not what they declare their tastes to be. In other words, I wouldn’t say my choice to watch hours of [redacted reality show] reflects my tastes, but if I looked at the amount of time I spent watching quality shows lately, well…

“People want to feel joy right now.”

Frankly, junk food TV is hard to resist — much like how I can’t just eat one Flamin’ Hot Cheeto. At a time when decision paralysis is a buzzword and the options are seemingly infinite, it’s enticing to know you can just sit down and hit play on the first thing on your screen. “People want to feel joy right now,” says Clara Sterling, a comedian, writer, and content creator who frequently goes viral on X, formerly Twitter, for her thoughts on TV. “They want something that doesn't feel like it's so demanding, and they want to be able to just have joy and relax.”

Taking decision-making out of our hands feels like a welcoming gesture at the end of a long workday — that’s one of the biggest appeals of scrolling on social media — but that reduces TV even more to a passive experience. It leaves us with an ultra-processed TV feed, eternally playing in the background. The question is: are you still watching?