After spending a soul-rending hour the other evening watching the planet lurch towards catastrophe on BBC News, I did the only thing that seemed remotely survivable: I watched Michael Scott burn his foot on a George Foreman grill in The Office. Classic coping strategy. When the world darkens, reach for comedy.
He had a point. I was thinking I’d been sensibly managing my mood, when perhaps I’d simply been feeding a culture of diversion that leaves us passive. It reminded me of a book I read years ago by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he argued that television turns the world into razzmatazz. When everything becomes entertainment, nothing carries any weight.
Suddenly, my 25-minute visit to the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company felt less like harmless relief and more like complicity. I’d only wanted a break from a news cycle that amplifies dread with every airstrike. Instead, apparently, I was another strand in the web.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: what does it mean to stay informed? The modern answer seems simple. Keep the news on. Witness events in Iran as they unfold. Stay alert. But when the same burning buildings and breaking banners loop every 15 minutes, there comes a point when updates stop informing and start agitating. It’s like standing under a fire alarm and insisting that you’re learning something new from every blare.
Now, with images of destruction in the Middle East so constant, the effect is different. We feel survivor’s guilt from a distance. And watching comedy can start to feel shameful, as if a sitcom were a trivial response to real-life trauma. But in feeling this moral dissonance, we may be misunderstanding television’s role.
Entertainment has always existed alongside tragedy. In the Second World War, ITMA thrived on the radio. During Covid, Strictly Come Dancing still filled Saturday nights. These shows weren’t acts of denial. They were psychological lifelines. Audiences weren’t indifferent to the crises around them; they simply needed somewhere to set their anxiety down for an hour or two.
The show also holds on to an unfashionable idea: that daftness and decency can live in the same person. Michael Scott may be misguided and petty, but he’s still worthy of compassion. In a public sphere that’s permanently raging, that small faith in human decency is refreshing. So, watching an episode needn’t be seen as abandoning the world, more a reminder of what’s worth protecting.
Still, television doesn’t have to anaesthetise you. Deciding what to watch – and, crucially, when to stop – can transform zombie viewing into something closer to a deliberate choice. Ignoring the “Continue Watching” prompt may be a modest act of defiance, but it is a conscious one. Not quite storming the streets with a placard, perhaps. But civic virtue comes in many flavours.
Outrage can be energising, but sustained indefinitely, it risks becoming knackering. And no one can live entirely at top volume. Which raises a quieter possibility: that an evening spent watching a situation comedy is not civic failure, but an emotional MOT. Rest is, after all, being increasingly framed as a small act of resistance – a way of giving the knockback to a culture of ceaseless urgency.
In the meantime, though, something is life-affirming about watching a world in which the worst disaster is an inept middle-manager grilling his foot for breakfast instead of bacon. Spending 25 minutes in Scranton won’t fix the planet, but it may just leave us fortified enough to confront it again after the credits roll.
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