Comfort Watching
Seven months into this pandemic, and I’ve begun watching TV shows that make me feel as soothed and cosseted as a hot bubble bath. Last year, my television-watching tastes were firmly in The Sinner, Ozark and Peaky Blinders territory – gritty, suspenseful and unsentimental shows that enthralled and horrified in equal measure. Often I’d watch them in bed on my iPad, lights off and duvet gripped tightly beneath my chin; like a child cheating her bedtime curfew. But with another lockdown underway and Christmas likely to be unlike any we’ve known before, I want the television shows I watch to feel restorative rather than provocative. To put it in culinary terms, I’m craving comforting pasta every night; not salmon en croute or stuffed peppers or steak with garlic butter, just a big bowl of reassuringly good rigatoni.
Television can be as much of a balm to our mental health as a fluffy towel is to sea-slapped skin. I remember several years ago, on the day I left a job I’d hated, coming home to my apartment, curling up in the foetal position on a big armchair, and watching a rerun of Cagney & Lacey. It was the perfect throwback and sparked a powerful muscle memory of childhood evenings in my parents’ house, watching it as a family, safe and warm and with no worries. It’s one hour of mentally unchallenging TV with a known outcome, and this is what I want right now. I can’t have it in real life, so I’ll take it in TV land, thanks very much. These days, my television diet is firmly on the schmaltzy side – from current television shows like The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4), DIY SOS: The Big Build Ireland (RTÉ 1), Escape To The Chateaux (MORE4), Gogglebox (Channel 4), Hollywood (Netflix) to old favourites such as Frasier (Channel 4) and Friends (Comedy Central).
And I’m not the only one seeking solace from their television screens this year. An article in The Guardian in March invited ten writers to reveal their favourite shows to watch during lockdown. It was a complete nostalgia fest, with contributors favouring nineties and noughties hits such as The West Wing, Gossip Girl and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The New York Times runs a series called “Comfort Viewing”, in which writers give three reasons why they love a particular TV show. They’re almost always old hits such as Columbo, Little House on the Prairie, Silent Witness and Melrose Place. According to an article in the National Geographic in July, more and more people are turning to television shows they enjoyed in their youth as a means of counteracting the uncertainty that’s all around them. The article reveals that a suite of studies published in 2013 found that, “nostalgia counteracts the meaninglessness that individuals experience when they are bored.” While a 2018 review concluded that “nostalgia acts as a buffer against existential threats.”
When an existential threat like a pandemic occurs, dystopian dramas begin to feel less other-worldly and more like possible realities. Does anyone doubt Donald and Melania Trump would settle in fine to the fictional Gilead?
It makes me wonder what the world will be like in four years' time if the president wins a second term on November 3. There’s too much to worry about, so I tune out of current affairs and into Frasier for a release. It’s my television comfort blanket these days. I love rewatching the dynamic between Niles and Daphne; they were the forerunners of Ross and Rachel – he obsessively in love, she oblivious. There’s a comfort and ease in watching reruns of both sitcoms, knowing all the time that the guy does get the girl in the end. The tension of ‘will they or won’t they’, experienced when the shows first aired, is removed and what’s left is just a lot of laughs and a calming inevitability that nothing bad is going to happen and everything will turn out okay in the end. In an interview with The Atlantic, Elizabeth Cohen, an associate professor specialising in media psychology, explained, “There’s a lot of comfort in knowing when something is going to happen. You don’t have to exert a lot of cognitive energy, so it doesn’t feel taxing. It can make you feel replenished.”
What else makes me feel replenished? Shows like DIY SOS: The Big Build Ireland and Gogglebox. The former simply reinforces my faith in human nature, revealing each week how good, kind and generous people are. Community spirit and hard work are the foundations of this TV property show, which has been adapted from the UK version presented by Nick Knowles since 1999. It sounds twee, doesn’t it? Maybe it is, but right now I feel better for having spent an hour in front of it. The tattooed men in hard hats wiping away tears and bear-hugging, the makeshift canteen serviced by local mums, and the moral at the end of the story delivered to camera by presenter Baz Ashmawy is a strangely addictive cocktail that washes down like an antidote to coronavirus updates and Trump’s tweets.
In a brilliant review of Gogglebox in The New Statesman way back in 2013, the journalist described herself, “crying watching a TV show of people crying watching a TV show I hate.” It is the most democratising of television shows, because, really, it has only one message and that is that we’re all the same. Whether you’re Giles and Mary in Wiltshire, Jenny and Lee in a caravan in Hull, at home with your husband in Dun Laoghaire, or like me and my sister, sitting on opposite sofas in our pyjamas in Cabinteely, we’re all watching the same TV and pretty much reacting the same way. Viewers collectively gasped in abject horror when Sura accidentally knocked over fellow competitor Paul’s pineapple upside-down cakes in the technical challenge of Bake Off’s first episode. The show is the perfect panacea for the loss of human connection we’re experiencing now that lockdown has forced us to hibernate for the foreseeable.
It may be Halloween this weekend, but I still want happy endings not horror stories. That’s why I thought Netflix’s miniseries Hollywood was worth a look. If Hollywood can’t deliver a fairytale ending, who can? The Guardian described the show as a “revisionist fantasy of postwar Hollywood”, and slates it as a “vapid exercise in self-regard, and self-celebration” by creator Ryan Murphy. But I loved it. Over the course of seven episodes, gay men and people of colour battle the prejudices of Tinseltown and win. It’s sentimental, romantic, visually beautiful, and yes, the story in no way bears out how little chance minorities had of succeeding in the American film industry in the 1940s due to racism, sexism and homophobia. But isn’t that the point? To offer something far better than reality? It is make-believe after all.
As soon as Halloween is over, I’m moving straight on to Christmas movies because there’s nothing more reassuring and heartwarming than A Christmas Carol (any version at all), Miracle on 34th Street (both the original and remake) and It’s A Wonderful Life (always in black and white). They’ll cocoon me through the rest of this Level 5 lockdown. Then all I can do is hope that there’s a vaccine by the time the new series of The Handmaid’s Tale hits our screens next year.
Marie Kelly, October 2020.
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