But if it made you laugh on a Tuesday night, or distracted you from a bad thought, or gave you something to talk about at the water cooler—it did its job.
We are living in the golden age of maximalist entertainment. Between the streaming wars, the podcast boom, and the algorithm feeding us short-form dopamine, we have more popular media at our fingertips than any civilization in history. Yet, we often find ourselves scrolling for 45 minutes, watching nothing, because we are paralyzed by choice.
You want to watch a man get yeeted off a cliff by a giant dragon. Or a real housewife flip a table. Or a tiktoker rate airport bathrooms. AsiaM.23.01.10.Song.Nan.Yi.And.Shen.Na.Na.XXX.1...
So, what are we actually looking for? And why does reality TV or a Marvel movie hit the spot in a way that “prestige cinema” sometimes cannot?
As we move deeper into the era of AI-generated scripts and interactive stories, the role of popular media will only grow. It is the campfire of the digital age. We gather around the glow of our phones to watch the same silly dances, the same dramatic reveals, and the same heroic last stands. But if it made you laugh on a
Let’s be honest. After a 10-hour workday, a fight with the group chat, and the Sisyphean task of folding that last pile of laundry, you don’t want to watch a three-hour subtitled documentary about the geopolitical implications of the lithium trade.
You are not "rotting your brain" because you read a fan fiction instead of War and Peace . You are not intellectually inferior because you watched Love Is Blind instead of the latest A24 art-house horror film. Yet, we often find ourselves scrolling for 45
You might not watch Euphoria , but you watch the TikTok breakdowns of the makeup. You might not play Five Nights at Freddy’s , but you watch the 4-hour YouTube essay explaining the lore. You might hate the Star Wars sequels, but you love watching critical reviews of them.