Watching TV At Work?

There’s not a lot that I miss about the pandemic, except that I watched an extraordinary amount of television while I worked. I found that Netflix removing The Office from its site on January 1, 2020 to be some really torturous foreshadowing for how shitty 2020 turned out to be. TV became my favorite thing to do while I worked, and to be honest I really did feel like it had no effect on my productivity. It started with having a background show on, like Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Parks and Recreation because I needed a stable, funny show to make it through the pandemic. Slowly through those dark days I began to watch newer content that I hadn’t passively memorized the scripts for. I don’t know about you but when I can quote tv shows that well I end up typing out whatever the actors are saying. So that was a bust, but watching new stuff also came with the added bonus that I got to meet more TV families and environments, and get to know a whole new group of people.

So I watched a lot of TV at work. I still watch a lot of TV at work, and it’s difficult to quash my guilty conscience about it. Most of the messaging we receive growing up centers around eliminating distractions to boost productivity, and if you have a TV going in the distance it sends the stigma that whatever task you are doing is being done half-heartedly. I gotta tell you, I think that’s a load of bull. I regularly did my homework with a TV on in the background, I worked through a global pandemic with TV shows in the distant background, and I will continue to perform daily life things with TV. The New York Times did a survey of 1600 Americans, and found that work is the third most common place people watch television, after plane and bus. Public restrooms came in 7th, in case you were wondering.

Covid may have killed the 9-5 work day culture, but I think that it broke the stigma that watching tv during the day is a deterrent to productivity. Having idle chatter in the background somehow soothes my frazzled and virtually nonexistent attention span. I’m no scientist, but this works for me. It’s like being in a cafe with people chatting idly near you, and depending on what you have on sometimes there’s fight scenes. It’s nice. It breaks up the day into smaller and more manageable chunks too, if you’re an episodic binger. It also does wonders for blocking out the horrors of modern day current events so that you can feel like you’re in a happy little tv show where everything is resolved at the end of the episode. A leftover feeling from Covid that seems to never really go away, and nothing in the world is happening to disabuse me of that notion.

I started writing this early this week and came to finish it on the heels of the Roe v. Wade decision being overturned. TV can be a welcome distraction from the 24 hour news cycle and the continuous string of bad decisions that American politics ushers in, in what feels like a daily routine of awful.

Stay safe out there.