- Tension: Television gets dismissed as passive entertainment, while quietly doing some of the most active emotional management in people’s daily lives.
- Noise: Framing heavy TV use as habit or preference obscures what the research and the conversations both keep surfacing — that the screen is often managing something the silence can’t.
- Direct Message: Television isn’t filling time — it’s filling a specific kind of space, and understanding what that space actually is changes the conversation entirely.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
According to Nielsen data, Americans spend an average of more than three and a half hours watching television every day. That is more time than most people spend exercising in a week. Almost no one frames it as a significant part of how they live. They describe it as something they do when they have nothing else going on.
When I asked people about their relationship with television, almost no one started by talking about the shows.
The answers nobody planned to give
What came up first, and most consistently, was something closer to companionship. The TV on in the background while cooking. A show playing during the hour before sleep. Familiar voices in an otherwise quiet apartment. The specific comfort of returning to a series already watched, where nothing could surprise you and every character was known.
A few people described a particular habit: turning the television on within minutes of arriving home, before doing anything else. Not because they planned to watch it. Because the silence of an empty apartment felt, in their words, like something that needed to be managed.
Others talked about television the way people talk about ritual, something that marks time. The Saturday morning show. The news at a certain hour. The series watched with a partner in the hour before sleep. The structure wasn’t about the content; the content was almost incidental. What mattered was the form, the reliable repetition of it.
Very few people described this directly as loneliness. Most framed it as preference, habit, or routine. But the distinction started to blur when the conversation went on long enough.
What the research suggests is happening
The term “parasocial relationship” was coined in 1956, when two psychologists tried to explain the emotional responses television viewers were developing toward the personalities speaking directly to them through the screen. The concern at the time was that viewers might not be able to distinguish these feelings from real relationships. The research since has been more nuanced than that.
Gayle Stever, a professor at SUNY Empire who has spent decades studying parasocial relationships, pushes back on the assumption that forming emotional bonds with television characters is primarily a symptom of loneliness. “Yes, lonely people form parasocial relationships,” she says, “but so do not-lonely people, who are just as likely to form a connection with that person on the screen.” Her research suggests the pull is more fundamental than social deficit. As she puts it: “The brain processes mediated images the same way it processes images encountered in real life.” The attachment is not a substitute. It is the real thing, neurologically speaking.
A 2026 study published in PLOS One by researchers at Huangshan University looked specifically at binge-watching addiction and its relationship to loneliness. Among heavy TV viewers, those who met the criteria for addictive watching showed a meaningful pattern: the researchers found that “loneliness significantly predicts binge-watching addiction, while escapism and emotional enhancement serve as dual pathways of emotion regulation.” In other words, people weren’t just watching to avoid feeling something. They were also watching to feel something. Both things were happening at once.
The ritual that television actually serves
Ritual is undersold as a function of television. The word sounds too intentional for something most people describe as passive, but it fits. A ritual is a repeated action that creates a container for emotion. It doesn’t have to be solemn to do that work. A weekly show with a partner, a specific program on a difficult evening, a familiar series rewatched in the months after a loss: these are all ways of using television to structure experience rather than simply fill time.
Several people described the comfort of returning to a series they had already seen. Not for the plot, since they knew the plot. For the company. Characters they already knew and trusted, in situations that would resolve in ways they could predict. The opposite of the tension of new things.
This is not a small thing. Predictability is a form of safety. In a period of a person’s life when external circumstances are uncertain or emotionally demanding, the ability to move through an hour with people who will not do anything unexpected is more meaningful than it might sound.
When entertainment is doing something else entirely
The question was never really about how much television people watch. It was about what they’re asking it to hold — and whether they know that’s what they’re doing.
What the silence reveals
Several people described trying to go without television for a period and being surprised by what they found in the quiet. Not boredom, exactly. Something more pointed than that. A clarity about how much of the day had been spent in the company of other people’s stories instead of their own thoughts.
Some found it useful. Others found it uncomfortable in a way they didn’t quite know what to do with. A few went back to the television without finishing the experiment.
What comes through most clearly in these conversations is that television is doing more work than the word “entertainment” suggests. It is managing mood, structuring time, providing the sensation of company, and in some cases doing the emotional heavy lifting of simply making a person feel less alone in their own home. None of that is inherently a problem. It only becomes worth examining when the person doing it doesn’t know that’s what they’re doing.
I’m not a psychologist, and none of this is professional advice. If loneliness is something you’re finding difficult to sit with, talking to someone is worth more than anything a screen can offer.
