There is a particular quality of silence that only arrives late on a spring evening, after the bird-song has faded and the house begins to settle into its own timber bones. In these quiet hours, when the world outside slows to a crawl, we are invited to do something that has become increasingly perilous in our modern age: simply to sit with our own thoughts. Yet, for most of us, this stillness is not a sanctuary to be savoured, but a void to be feared. We have built massive, high-definition barriers against the quiet—five-foot shrines of glass that claim our walls and dominate our living spaces. We call it connection; we call it curation, and we boast of our digital liberation. But beneath the polished veneer of our modern viewing habits lies a far more feral reality, where the ancient, bloody spectacle of the arena has not been banished at all. It has merely been dressed in a tuxedo.
To walk down any street in almost any town or city across the world on a mild May evening is to observe a muted revolution in the way we consume human struggle. Through the windowpanes, as the late spring twilight fades, the flickering blue glow of the traditional television set has vanished. In their place are the smaller, colder lights of laptops, tablets, and smartphones, or the vast, cinematic canvases that now dominate our walls.
Screens that were once tiny, boxy things hidden quietly in the corner of a room—discreetly housed in wooden cabinets as if acknowledging their status as mere domestic guests—have grown into giants. Today, the average set sold across Europe spans sixty-five inches across—more than five and a half feet of high-definition glass dominating the architecture of the modern home. The physical box of the old era has been cast out, yet the glass has only expanded, claiming our walls, dictating our living spaces, and arresting our collective attention.
This digital liberation is something we congratulate ourselves on. We refer to ‘cutting the cord’ and liberating ourselves from the tyranny of the broadcasting schedule. By selecting when, what, and how we view content, we’ve transformed from passive viewers into deliberate curators. We assume that because we have banished the physical television set, we have also banished the intellectual vacuum that once defined it.
This is a lie we tell ourselves to sleep at night.
Our digital realms provide very little television that offers intellectual stimulation or genuine challenge. Instead, we are faced with the same sub-moronic drivel, designed not to make us think, but simply to keep us sated. The medium has changed, but the appetite remains remarkably unchanged. The screens have grown wider; the resolutions have grown sharper, but the essence of what we consume has merely been rebranded. We have not escaped the dross; we have simply gentrified it.
Worse still are the modern ascetics who take to social media to proclaim their superiority loudly, broadcasting to the digital village that they do not own a television set. They compose smug, self-satisfied posts, wrapping themselves in the mantle of intellectual enlightenment as if discarding a black plastic rectangle on the wall has somehow liberated their minds.
This is a pathetic, hypocritical performance in vanity. Having broadcast their righteousness to the world, they retreat into the quiet of their rooms to spend hours hunched over laptops, clutching tablets, and staring into smartphones, mainlining the exact same brain-dead garbage. They climb onto a virtual pedestal of their own design, blind to the absurdity of their position. The location of the screen has changed, but the vacuum remains. We have miniaturised our passivity, crawled into bed with our hypocrisy, and allowed the digital butler to feed us our daily dose of sub-moronic dross on a slightly smaller, more personal portal. We have merely miniaturised our passivity, crawled into bed with our hypocrisy, and allowed the digital butler to feed us our daily dose of sub-moronic dross on a slightly smaller, more personal portal.
I offer no excuses for my behaviour in this area, and I don’t claim to possess flawless intellectual purity. I, too, have fallen into the comfortable, repetitive rhythm of the screen, letting the hours slip away on autopilot. I have carried my own hypocrisies, maintained my own comfortable visual habits, and struggled to break the gravitational pull of the comfortable loop. To look upon this modern wasteland is not to look down from a high hill of purity; it is to confess to the very mud we are all standing in.
In 1992, Bruce Springsteen captured this modern paralysis with prophetic simplicity in his song 57 Channels (And Nothin’ On). Writing at the dawn of the cable and satellite boom, he sang of pointing a dish to the stars, only for a message to return from the great beyond: ‘Son, there’s fifty-seven channels and nothing on.’ Over three decades later, those fifty-seven channels have multiplied into infinite, on-demand libraries spanning the sum of human production. Yet, the tragedy remains unchanged. We have replaced the physical dial with an endless scroll, but our screens remain just as vacant, leaving us to echo the singer’s warning: ‘I can see by your eyes, friend, you’re just about gone.’
The word ‘dross’ carries a heavy alchemical truth. Historically, it is the worthless scum that rises to the surface of molten metal during the smelting process—the waste product of industry, the impurities cast aside in the pursuit of something precious.
In our contemporary media landscape, dross is the default currency. It is the endless, formulaic sitcom, the repetitive police procedural, and the low-effort reality broadcast. For decades, this dross was delivered to our living rooms in a steady, scheduled stream. It was designed to require nothing of us, and in return, it gave us nothing but distraction. It was the background hum of the late-twentieth-century home: a low-friction, low-stakes sedative that filled the gaps between our working days and our sleeping hours.
To understand how this dross evolved into its modern, prestigious forms, one must first look back to the unpolished arenas of thirty years ago. The late twentieth century gave rise to a raw, gladiatorial form of television that can only be described as ‘bear pit TV’. Programmes like The Jerry Springer Show or The Jeremy Kyle Show offered no intellectual value, artistic merit, or moral instruction. These were modern coliseums where the vulnerable, the desperate, and the broken were paraded on a stage to be baited by a roaring studio audience.
It was a spectacle of raw, unrefined cruelty. We watched people scream; we watched families fracture, and we watched the public dissection of private misery, all for the price of a commercial break. Eventually, the public conscience caught up with the spectacle. The amphitheatre was deemed too vulgar, the public executions of dignity were deemed too cruel, and the gates of the physical bear pit were closed.
But the human appetite for voyeurism and shock does not disappear simply because a television show is cancelled. The lizard brain still craves the spectacle of the arena. Recognising this, the architects of modern media did something far cleverer: they dressed the bear pit in a tuxedo and refined the dross for a more self-conscious age.
Today, the raw shouting matches of the old talk shows have been replaced by the polite, warm-toned narratives of ‘wholesome’ class-swap documentaries. In these programmes, high-definition cameras peer into the bare larders of the impoverished and marvel at the sprawling, manicured estates of the wealthy. We do not call this exploitation; we call it social commentary. We watch as systemic inequality and the profound anxieties of the working class are packaged into a neat, sixty-minute arc of human reconciliation, complete with a swelling orchestral soundtrack and a heartwarming embrace before the credits roll.
This is class tourism masquerading as empathy. The viewers of these shows are not engaging in deep social reflection; they are classist voyeurs using the poverty of others as a cheap, emotional wet-wipe to clean their own consciences. The mechanism is identical to the old bear pit. We are still consuming the stark, tragic divides of our society for our evening entertainment; we are still treating the struggles of the less fortunate as a curious exhibit to be viewed from the comfort of our sofas. But the modern packaging allows us to indulge our curiosity without the hangover of moral guilt. We get to feel sympathetic rather than voyeuristic, though our actions remain entirely passive.
The old bear pit was a loud place for polite society; the modern stream is a polite place for our loud instincts.
Where we cannot gentrify the spectacle, we aggressively strip away the filters of decency. Beside the class tourism of our documentaries sits a more visceral, blood-soaked voyeurism: the endless parade of programmes following the emergency services. We ride shotgun with film crews in police interceptors, or stand as silent, uninvited ghosts in the sterile trauma bays of accident and emergency departments.
We tell ourselves we watch these programmes out of civic appreciation, or perhaps to marvel at the dedication of those on the front line. But this, too, is a comforting illusion. Beneath the thin veneer of respectability, the appetite is far more feral. We do not watch for the administrative competence of the state; we watch for the blood, the carnage, and the kinetic thrill of the chase. We gorge on dash-cam compilations of dangerous drivers, counting down the seconds until metal twists and glass shatters on the asphalt, consuming real-world catastrophe as a casual accompaniment to our evening meal.
The Scottish singer Fish summed up this digital voyeurism with scathing precision in his 1990 track The Voyeur (I Like to Watch). He sang of tracking satellite beams for instant action, letting the ‘live light’ bleed directly into our living rooms while our senses sit on remote control. It is an indictment of an audience that watches disasters replayed in slow-motion, treating front doors kicked in by police as peak-time performance art. The song lays bare our ultimate hypocrisy: we sit back, safely insulated behind the glass, watching the private tragedies of strangers auctioned off to the highest bidder, reduced to mere spectators who ‘like to watch, to judge.’
This gentrification has seeped deeply into our fiction, where the modern standard of ‘serious’ or ‘gritty’ storytelling has become synonymous with a relentless, uncompromising barrage of explicit content: graphic violence, casual sex, and constant profanity. As I observed in an earlier Underhill Letter, Resisting Numbness, stories once wielded conflict with a mythic, dramatic purpose. Now that the weight has been reduced to background noise, integrated into almost every major release to capture our fleeting attention.
In high-budget fantasy, science fiction, and crime dramas, the reliance on excess has become a creative shortcut. A television show is no longer deemed ‘gritty’ unless the violence is relentless and visceral; a film is not considered ‘serious’ unless it features drawn-out suffering. This is not art using conflict to highlight the human condition; this is the industry using shock as an instant fix to hook our attention in an entertainment landscape focused entirely on holding viewers’ eyes.
The real danger of this sensory escalation is not the violence or the profanity itself, but the profound psychological numbing it induces. When excess becomes the default setting of our screens, the impact of suffering begins to dull. This is not just a habit of the algorithm; it is an active form of moral decay.
We sit through scenes of characters being torn apart, burned, beaten, and destroyed on our five-foot screens, and we barely flinch. The camera lingers, the suffering stretches out, and we absorb it as mere background noise, a stylistic choice designed to make a scene feel ‘intense’. We are willingly paying tech empires to lobotomise our capacity for grief, choosing the comfortable drift of desensitisation over the difficult work of feeling.
This normalisation is weaponised by the structure of modern streaming culture. The traditional television schedule of the past, for all its faults, forced a natural pause upon the viewer. A programme ended, the screen returned to the presenter, or the news came on, and the viewer was returned to the silence of the room. There was space to breathe, space to reflect, and space to let the weight of a story settle in the mind.
The modern streaming platform has obliterated this space. It has weaponised the five-second countdown timer, ensuring that the next episode is already loading before the emotional weight of the previous one can be processed. Binge-watching turns shocking moments into a steady, uninterrupted drumbeat. We consume graphic content without pauses, without silence, and without space to reflect. The suffering blurs together, scene after scene, episode after episode, until death stops being an event and becomes merely a pattern, a rhythm, a routine.
Consider how this contrast operates in our storytelling traditions. In classics of cinematic restraint, such as Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, massive battle sequences are depicted without relying on excessive, lingering brutality. In the siege of Helm’s Deep, the camera focuses on the strategy, the immense scale, and the emotional stakes rather than close-up depictions of gore. When Boromir falls, his wounds are not exaggerated for shock value; instead, the scene lingers on his sacrifice, his redemption, and the profound sorrow of his companions. Tolkien understood that war and struggle must feel immense, but they should never feel gratuitous. The violence matters because of what it means, not because of how it looks.
Similarly, in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, violence is treated as a swift, calculated instrument of survival rather than an ongoing spectacle. In Hacksaw Ridge, though the battlefield injuries are graphic, the focus is never on the spectacle of destruction; it is on Desmond Doss’s unwavering determination to save lives rather than take them. The suffering is present, but it serves a higher narrative purpose: it highlights his conviction, making his compassion feel like an act of defiance against a broken world.
But these stories of restraint are rapidly becoming the exception rather than the rule. The frustrating reality is that while there are still stories that build tension through atmosphere, mystery, and pacing, they are increasingly outnumbered by those that rely on immediate, explicit confrontation. Suspense requires patience. It requires a trust in the audience’s ability to sit with uncertainty, to feel fear, and to contemplate meaning. Graphic conflict, by contrast, offers immediacy. It requires no buildup, no subtlety, and no effort. It shocks instantly, and in a world where attention is mined for profit, immediacy always wins out over restraint.
Yet, we need not remain prisoners of this sensory siege. To break the loop of modern, sub-moronic dross, we must look backward to find the scaffolding of a different attention span.
In Old Films, Quiet Hours, I wrote of a particular, quiet frequency found in the black-and-white cinema of the mid-twentieth century—especially the modest, pulpy B-movies of 1950s science fiction. In those films, there is no reliance on extravagant special effects or graphic violence. Instead, they exist entirely in the quiet hours, offering an atmosphere of restraint and suggestion. A footprint in the sand, a low hum of a theremin, or a shadow stretching across a monochrome landscape—these modest tools conjured an awe that modern CGI budgets can never buy.
Consider the patient parable of The Day the Earth Stood Still. The alien messenger, Klaatu, arrives not as an explosive conqueror, but as a quiet witness who lands his craft in absolute silence. His words are measured; the score hums like a soft warning, and the city simply pauses. Or look to The War of the Worlds, where Clayton Forrester is not a modern, weaponised hero who saves the day with explosive bravado, but a witness who watches the world unravel. He survives through ruins, shelters in quiet churches, and endures. The resolution is not a violent triumph, but a quiet, ancient realisation of our own minuscule place in a massive universe.
These compact, ninety-minute vignettes did not seek to dazzle; they sought to haunt. They did not shout; they hummed. They did not demand our attention with saturated, digital glare; they invited it with mystery and silence. The monochrome grain softened the edges of fear and made room for the slow erosion of certainty. This was television acting not as an algorithmic trap, but as a hearth—a threshold that opened a door in the mind rather than slamming it shut.
The great illusion of our digital age is that active curation is the same as active living.
We download our shows, we subscription-hop from platform to platform, and we curate our digital libraries with the precision of a classical scholar. We tell ourselves that because we do not own a television; we are free from the dross. But a curated loop of dross is still a loop. Whether we are binging a high-concept science fiction serial, repeating an annual cycle of a familiar sitcom, or watching the polite, classist voyeurism of a swap documentary, we are still lingering in the modern amphitheatre, letting the digital butler decide how we spend our finite days.
What happens to a culture when suffering becomes routine? What happens when violence, sex, and profanity stop shocking us altogether? Do we simply expect the next scene of hardship to outdo the last, forcing filmmakers to escalate the brutality just to ensure we still care?
And, most unsettlingly of all, if we stop reacting to suffering in our fiction, does it change how we respond to suffering in reality? If we are conditioned to absorb pain on our screens—whether five-foot wide or pocket-sized—without a single moment of reflection, does that numbness extend to the real-world injustices, losses, and tragedies we see through our digital windows?
We must resist this numbness. We must refuse to reach the point where brutality—real or fictional—no longer makes us pause. We have traded the quiet effort of contemplation for the immediate reaction of spectacle; we are shocked by everything, yet we feel nothing.
The ultimate act of modern cultural rebellion is not a grand, dramatic rejection of our screens, nor is it an exile into some sterile, technophobic isolation. It is a much quieter, more difficult gesture. It is the ability to ask why we are watching, mid-scene, and to have the strength to press pause. It is the willingness to leave the digital butler waiting at the door, to let the five-foot screen sit dark on the wall, and to choose the stillness of the room over the comfortable, numbing hum of the dross.
Until next time.
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