Trash TV Is Your Therapist and You Should Stop Apologizing for It

Somewhere right now, a perfectly intelligent adult is watching an episode of The Bachelor they've already seen twice. They know who gets eliminated. They know the dramatic music cue that precedes the crying. They are watching anyway, and they feel a little bit guilty about it.

They shouldn't.

The guilt is the interesting part, actually. We've built an entire cultural narrative around the idea that screen time should be earned — that what you watch should challenge you, expand you, make you a more sophisticated human being. And when it doesn't? When you're cycling through a mediocre reality show for the third time instead of finally getting to that prestige drama everyone keeps recommending? The shame spiral kicks in right on schedule.

But here's what the shame spiral gets completely wrong.

Your Brain Isn't Bored. It's Busy.

When psychologists study what they call "media comfort consumption," a consistent pattern emerges: people don't return to familiar content because they've run out of options. They return to it because familiarity itself is doing real cognitive work.

The brain expends significant energy processing new information — tracking unfamiliar characters, predicting outcomes, building narrative maps from scratch. When you watch something you've already seen, that processing cost drops dramatically. The story becomes a kind of background hum. And in that freed-up mental space, something else happens: emotional regulation.

Psychologists at the University of Buffalo found that parasocial relationships — the one-sided bonds we form with fictional characters — can genuinely buffer against loneliness and low self-esteem. Returning to those characters isn't regression. It's reconnection. It's the television equivalent of calling a friend you already know is going to pick up.

The show doesn't even have to be good. In fact, there's an argument that it's better when it isn't.

Why "Bad" Shows Work Better Than Good Ones

Here's the counterintuitive part. A truly great drama — the kind that wins Emmys and gets think-pieces — demands something from you. The Bear makes you anxious. Succession makes you think. The Wire makes you pay attention or you lose the thread entirely.

A comfort rewatch of something like Gilmore Girls or Schitt's Creek or an early season of Grey's Anatomy asks almost nothing. The stakes are known. The emotional beats are telegraphed. You can fold laundry, half-sleep, scroll your phone, and still feel like you're somewhere safe.

That safety is the product. Not the plot.

Think of it as the TV equivalent of a weighted blanket. Nobody criticizes weighted blankets for being too simple. Nobody says "you should really challenge yourself with a blanket that's new." The comfort IS the function. The familiarity IS the point.

The Endless Choice Problem

It's worth acknowledging the specific cultural moment we're living in when we talk about comfort rewatching. Americans in 2025 have access to somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 pieces of content across major streaming platforms. That number is not an exaggeration. It is genuinely, cognitively unmanageable.

Decision fatigue is real and well-documented. When you face an overwhelming number of choices, your brain's ability to make any choice degrades. The result is that people often choose the worst option — not the best one — simply because it requires the least deliberation.

Comfort rewatching short-circuits that entire exhausting process. You don't have to evaluate anything. You already know what you're getting. In an era of infinite content, already knowing is a premium feature.

The streaming platforms understand this, by the way. That's why Netflix keeps your watch history and surfaces shows you've already completed. They know that a rewatch is a guaranteed engagement, and guaranteed engagement is worth more to their algorithm than a new show you might abandon after twelve minutes.

The Guilt Is a Marketing Problem, Not a Personal One

So where does the shame come from? Partly from a culture that conflates consumption with self-improvement — the idea that every hour spent with media should be making you smarter, more empathetic, more culturally literate. It's the same energy that makes people feel bad about reading genre fiction instead of literary novels, or listening to pop music instead of jazz.

But there's also something more specific going on with television. The Peak TV era — roughly 2012 to now — created a discourse around "good TV" that is genuinely unprecedented. Television became a serious art form, and that's mostly wonderful. But it also created a new kind of cultural pressure: the idea that watching TV wrong is something you can actually do.

You can't. There is no wrong way to use your own downtime for your own nervous system.

Comfort rewatching is, at its core, a self-soothing behavior. It belongs in the same category as a familiar meal, a worn-in sweatshirt, or a playlist you've had since college. It isn't failure. It's maintenance.

What You're Actually Getting Out of It

Let's be specific about the benefits, because they're more substantial than "I felt cozy."

Repetitive viewing builds a kind of emotional fluency. When you know a show's rhythms deeply, you can use it more precisely — queuing up the episode that reliably makes you laugh when you're stressed, or the one that makes you cry when you need to release something. That's not passive consumption. That's a toolkit.

Familiar narratives also provide structure during periods of chaos. Multiple studies done during the COVID-19 pandemic found that comfort media consumption spiked dramatically — not because people had more time (many did), but because predictable story structures helped regulate anxiety when the real world felt completely unpredictable. People weren't escaping reality. They were stabilizing themselves so they could return to it.

The Summary Version (Because That's What We Do Here)

You don't owe your screen time to prestige television. You don't owe your off-hours to self-improvement. And you definitely don't owe anyone an apology for watching the same middling show you've seen four times because it makes your brain go quiet for forty-five minutes.

Comfort rewatching is a legitimate, psychologically coherent response to a world that is loud, uncertain, and full of too many choices. It's not laziness dressed up as entertainment. It's your nervous system asking for something familiar, and you being smart enough to give it what it needs.

The real waste of time isn't the rewatch. It's the guilt you're spending on it.