Everything That’s Wrong With 2019, As Explained By Breakfast TV
We’re stuck in an endless content churn.
One of the first jobs I had in TV was for a satirical news program, watching all of the breakfast TV shows and taking notes.
Every day I would watch each of Australia’s four breakfast TV offerings (this was during the tenure of 10’s disastrous Breakfast with Paul Henry) and log notable quotes, or fuck ups, or anything that our show might be able to use over the course of our weekly broadcast.
Each show went for three hours, which meant that every single day I would watch twelve hours of breakfast TV.
Of course, there wasn’t enough time in a work day to watch all four programs and take the notes I needed to, so I ended up watching them at double speed. And after three months of this, something not particularly surprising happened and I had a discrete, quiet, but robust mental breakdown.
The problem, I remember explaining to my wife, was that this media was simply not designed to be ingested in this way.
Adam Boland, the wunderkind behind Sunrise, has said that the average viewer watches around nine minutes of breakfast TV in any one go. They watch nine minutes of Kochie asking Prue Macsween if we should liquidate the homeless for nutrients, or Stevie Jacobs doing the weather cross in Moree from The World’s Largest Quiche, and then they go drop the kids off to school or head into work and they don’t watch any more of it.
And in doing this they don’t become medically insane.
Should clapping be banned? @EllenCScott says theatres should swap clapping for 'jazz hands' to be more 'inclusive' to those with anxiety or sensitivity to loud sounds.
What do you think?
#GMB pic.twitter.com/Bc5WHBbOpn— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) November 7, 2019
Everything Happens So Much
I’ve given a lot of thought as to what it is about this form of media that means it has to be, essentially, micro-dosed, and I think I’ve finally worked it out.
The thing that most people don’t understand about breakfast television — and the thing that once you do understand makes sense of pretty much every facet of it — is that three hours is a patently insane amount of TV to make every single day of the week.
One of the reasons we don’t think about this is that, as Adam Boland says, virtually no one actually watches three hours of it. It has to go for three hours because every single person in the country has their nine minutes in the morning where they watch TV with a bit of toast in their mouth.
If everyone agreed to do this at exactly the same time every morning, we could probably keep these shows to around 15 minutes tops.
But we won’t so we can’t.
As a result, a team of people — a far smaller and younger team of people than you probably imagine — have to shovel content into the maw of this monster that eats time, so that it will lumber from one ad break to the next over the course of 180 minutes: every morning, every day, every week until the sun graciously explodes and ends this routine.
Everything happens so much
— Horse ebooks (@Horse_ebooks) June 28, 2012
The Time Monster
By far the cheapest and easiest and most reliable fuel to keep this train chugging along is by asking, over and over and over again, “what do we reckon?”
Because if you take away the part of breakfast television where the hosts and pundits and experts and everyday people tell you what their opinion is on any given subject, then you’re left with around fifteen minutes of news, sport and an intern in a cow suit giving money to a bewildered pensioner.
So, you fill it with the cheapest, the easiest and the most accessible content available — opinion.
So, you fill it with the cheapest, the easiest and the most accessible content available — opinion.
Consider the difference in labour between making a three minute news package — even a bad one — and making the five minutes of discussion that follow that news package.
One requires news gathering, writing, travel, interviews, research, a journalist, a camera crew, an editor — multiple people with a level of specialised skill and experience, some of whom probably suck at their jobs but, crucially, none of whom could be replaced by someone you found at the bus stop.
Not so for the discussion. The only thing that qualifies a person to go on breakfast television and produce five minutes of content is the willingness to turn up to a studio early in the morning for little more than a Cabcharge, and talk until they are told to stop.
My Brain (And Everyone’s Brain) Is Broken
And so, after three months of this my mind turned to soup.
This is not the fault of breakfast TV. As I say, it’s simply not meant to be consumed like this. If I eat three cans of pickles in one sitting and get diarrhoea for a week, I don’t blame the pickle company.
If I eat three cans of pickles in one sitting and get diarrhoea for a week, I don’t blame the pickle company.
But what I find interesting is the way in which this specific kind of TV boiled my brain. The only way I can describe it is a kind of inability to see anything as it is, and instead as it means.
Nothing was safe from this mindset. Not a film, not a conversation with a friend, not a nice sit in a park on a bright summer’s day. Behind everything there lurked some fascinating and essential truth just waiting to be extrapolated. And this is, you’ll appreciate, a psychologically crippling way to interact with the world. It sounds more dramatic than it was, and after a few weeks everything returned to normal, brain-wise.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that time and that mindset recently, because despite staying a comfortable distance away from breakfast TV these days, that feeling seems to be creeping back. And not just for me.
turning a big dial taht says "Racism" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right
— wint (@dril) March 15, 2017
It’s Not Just Breakfast TV
We’re stuck in an endless content churn, where we obsessively try to wring meaning from the practically meaningless, falling over each other to get to the bottom of what this song, or show, or earthquake Really Says About Things When You Think About It.
Nothing is actually about the thing it is, it’s about the other thing. (Here I think it’s important to, like when Sideshow Bob appeared on TV in order to decry it, point out that I am aware of the irony of this piece being republished in Junkee of all places.)
The sheer amount of stuff that needs to be pumped into the world at all times, is difficult to overstate.
This relentless onslaught of hot takes is often framed as a problem with social media, which then infects the Actual Media — but I think that gets things backwards. Because the problem faced by those content-desperate producers of breakfast television is not confined to those programs, or that medium.
The amount of content that needs to be produced every single day, the sheer amount of stuff that needs to be pumped into the world at all times, is difficult to overstate. And filling this content deficit with virtually anything other than opinion is prohibitively expensive and inefficient.
So, now every single outlet on the planet has the same breakfast show problem, with the same breakfast show solution — “what do we reckon?” — and the sheer amount of opinions to which the average person is exposed on a daily basis would cause someone from even 100 years ago to immediately shit their pants.
Unlike breakfast TV, though, we don’t consume it for nine minutes at a time, we live and breathe and bathe in it and, like me in my early 20s, hunched over a laptop watching a sped-up Karl Stefanovic get cross about hand-stands being banned in a school in Dubbo, I think it is causing us to become mad.
It can’t help but inform how we think about things and how we, in turn, talk and post about them.
Nothing — a film, a scene, a novel, a review, an essay, an interview — is actually about the thing it is. This is all especially mental when you consider that this approach doesn’t come from any underlying philosophy from anyone, but rather a desperate need to just cram the passing minutes or column inches or pixels with literally anything that works.
For what it’s worth, I have no idea how to fix any of this.
This essay was originally published in Ben Jenkin’s newsletter, The Idiot Report. Ben Jenkins is a writer. He tweets at @bencjenkins