"Background Shows" Are My Nightmare

Get the Full StoryBackground watchers: blink twice if you're OK. If you habitually have a TV show, movie, or podcast playing in the background while you do other tasks, you might be among the growing numbers of people who report using the sounds of shows as a buffer from their own internal monologue, and who rely on filler noise to drown out any silence that makes them feel alone.

Historically, my dear, lonesome background watchers, I have not considered myself among your ranks. Don't get me wrong, I'm just as lonely and lost as everyone else appears to be, but my auditory hypersensitivity means that competing sounds - like the shouting on a TV show against the clatter of dishes in my kitchen, or the chatter of my couchmates - can be really irritating and overstimulating for me. I also come from a home of film buffs and screenwriters who keep their fingers trained on the "pause" button for any minor disturbance, so a particular watching etiquette was burned into my psyche from a young age.

But even I have to admit that my watching habits are changing. Now more than ever before, when I have a show or podcast playing, I've noticed I'm more likely to reach for my phone and scroll Instagram or do a word puzzle the New York Times Spelling Bee is my Achilles heel , not fully digesting anything on either platform. I feel dirty every time I do it, yet it's becoming routine. Many of us would probably blame the hyperconnectivity of the internet age on our increasing inability to focus - but research hasn't yet caught up enough to tell us exactly how all this hyperconnectivity is affecting our brains.

Anecdotally, undivided focus feels like a thing of the past. Fifteen or 20 years ago, if you were to put on the TV or the radio, an audiobook, or a podcast , the expectation, and goal, was that it would be stimulating enough to hold your engagement. But among millennials and Gen Z, including in my own circles, that is now increasingly rare.

In an informal survey of 15 of my friends and colleagues, almost all say they must have something playing in the background when doing "menial chores" like cooking or laundry. Music sometimes does the trick, but it's audiobooks, podcasts, and even long TikToks that provide the preferred noise. Two colleagues say they play "mindless TV" while doing housework, which includes series from the Food Network and HGTV, plus comforting oldies like "The Office" and "Friends."

Of my close friends with serial background-watching tendencies, one says she likes to have a TV show playing on low whenever she has busy work to do like her taxes, which she recently completed with a side of "Parks and Recreation" or when she has friends over.

One colleague, who says she listens to podcasts in the shower, mentioned on Slack that her brother "CONSTANTLY has some video stream going on in the background while he does literally anything and everything." When I asked him about it, he confirmed.

"I'll almost always have a YouTube video or music playing throughout the day," he tells PS over email, also noting that he keeps the shower running when he's in the bathroom or kitchen for the ambient noise. He's 33 now, but it's something he's done since he was a little kid, though he only recently started to understand the behavior as a function of his neurodivergence.

"Upon being diagnosed with ADHD and subsequently autism in the last few years, I've learned that this is a sensory input I need to regulate myself," he says. "So it's not something I view as a 'bad' habit outside of rare instances where indulging would be inconsiderate."

Multiple colleagues and friends also cited ADHD and OCD as the impetus for their background shows, explaining that background shows actually help them concentrate better. This bears out in the clinical world, where some ADHD coaches prescribe their clients "Law & Order" and "American Idol" to help with procrastination.

But with a sharp rise in ADHD diagnoses in the last decade, it's worth asking: What is really happening to our attention spans as our media diets expand exponentially? Is background TV secretly helping us focus, or is it accelerating our inability to give undivided attention to one thing at a time?

One potentially sexist? 2023 study out of Taiwan found that children were more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD by age 8 if their mothers were habitual consumers of screen and digital media, not their fathers or even themselves. While the results of the study come dangerously close to blaming "lazy mothers" for a global swell in ADHD cases - eye roll - its other implications are interesting: If the culprit is a parent's screen time, presumably large numbers of young kids who developed ADHD were exposed to a lot of background TV.

To that end, though background shows may help manage symptoms of ADHD, some researchers are concerned that they can actually cause ADHD or other developmental issues in children. But not enough research is conclusive or even current. Several US studies from the early 2000s revealed that background TV was damaging to cognitive performance. Those findings may be a little dated, but they're still troubling - especially considering that in 2012, one study said young children in the US are exposed to almost four hours of background television per day. Similarly, in 2017, one study found the TV is left on all or most of the time in 42 percent of US households with children 0 to 8 years old.

While the full impacts of this kind of media dis engagement are still unknown, our "chatter culture" is having a decidedly negative effect on American society. As with Gen Z's growing obsession with voice notes, an inflated reliance on hearing ourselves talk just to fill the silence has given rise to political trends that not only fray the edges of democracy but take a seam ripper to the whole thing.

My greatest fear is that our appetite for background TV gives tech giants, many of whom have an obvious interest in government and public policy, more license to replace human-made art with AI-generated filler. Stylist magazine once dubbed "Emily in Paris" the perfect background show because "it doesn't matter how many times you look away from the screen, or get caught up in a task, or start tuning out what the characters are saying, because you'll look back to find yourself exactly where you'd expect to find yourself; a ridiculously picturesque cobbled Parisian street."

Over the course of TV history there have been plenty of sitcoms, soaps, and fluffy shows that have been criticized for being formulaic. But the monotony of shows like "Emily in Paris" is not just formulaic, it's borderline robotic. Boring art is art that can be replicated by AI, and art that's easy to tune out. The stuff that plays in the background - that we don't really engage with - is the stuff that can manipulate us more because we're not paying attention. With all the demand for background shows, it's not hard to imagine media executives greenlighting content that feels like it was made by a computer instead of content with more depth.

For some background watchers, their reliance on "mindless" media is starting to freak them out. Another close friend of mine, for example, plays Real Housewives in the background while she cleans her apartment and does other chores, but she's beginning to feel "disgusted" with how much reality TV vernacular has started to seep into her brain.

My truth is that I'm not a silence purist. I listen to music while I write, and sometimes like right now ambient nature sounds. And it's not that I'll never have a show on for white noise; in my most unregulated and anxious moments or when I'm paranoid that I'm being haunted by the ghost of a mad prospector's wife I will keep some TV on as I fall asleep. But half-comatose and spiritually checked-out is not my preferred headspace for consuming art - even the silly stuff that I've seen a million times.

There's no denying that it's getting harder to tune in and focus on much of anything, especially when a lot of it - whether it's TV or social media or a podcast - starts to look and sound the same. But if pop culture continues down this cardboard path, feeling more machine-made by the day, then the media we consume needs our full attention more than ever, so we know when something is real or fake. However you need to get your work done or unwind after a long day is your business. If that requires background shows, more power to you. But it's when we blur the lines and start tuning out the wrong stuff that we get in trouble.

Related:

I Went on a "Quiet Quest" and Learned a Lot About Slowing Down

Emma Glassman-Hughes she her is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she's covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.

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