The triumph of brazenly uncomplicated entertainment.
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Its an excellent season of TV.
Its an indicator of quality.
Maybe you will too?
The other differentiator lurking inside the best-versus-favorite distinction has to do with pleasure.
The best of something may be challenging or hard to watch.
It means that consuming something was a gratifying experience.
When compared withbest, favoriteis simultaneously more delightful and less prestigious.
As much as anything else, the appeal ofThe Baby-Sitters Clublies in how unabashedly comforting it is.
It is generous storytelling, undemanding and straightforward.
Coronavirus and political anxiety have accelerated this shift toward comfort TV.
All those things combined have brought us to this moment, this embrace of the comforting and the undemanding.
Not all comfort TV is great, by any means, but neither was all of prestige TV.
The difference now is that accessibility and cheerfulness do not instantly render a show less important.
The desire for TV shows that foreground delight rather than despair is not a form of weakness.
TV that makes us sad is not inherently better.
Prestige TV hasalways been difficult to categorize, in part because it is a mirage.
Its gradual dissolution over the past several years is equally tricky to nail to any specific benchmark.
Much of its definition comes from a shows reception, Murray concluded.
Mostly extravagantly unlikable anti-heroes whose sheer awfulness makes us feel better about our own, more mundane foibles.
It is a classist assessment, one that implies inaccessibility, scarcity, but also widespread influence and importance.
Prestige TV is demanding, something that creates a further classist implication about its audience.
Several things happened instead.
Prestige began to feel like homework, and the prestige-signaling phrase Its more of a ten-hour movie!
started to sound like a test of endurance.
Its not that prestige TV has disappeared or completely lost the ability to capture awards or audience attention.
Its not even that great TV shows arent still being made in the prestige model.
It has become one mode of TV among many.
The idea thatits fundamentally suspect to take pleasure in entertainment is an old one.
In her thinking, to experience pleasure through entertainment is base.
Sitting through a long, boring book on an important topic that makes you a better person.
Usually they fall in.
Its not trying to be.
But it does succeed at exactly what it sets out to do.
But at a time when so many TV viewers need to be soothed, value propositions change.
Excellence is also judged by the capacity to calm and gratify.
Front-loading pleasure can mean different things.
Its the This silly show is actually quite good!
mode, the era of If you liked X, you might like Y.
Where prestige was often driven by critics guiding viewers to the best programming, comfort TV inverts the order.
Some elements of comfort television, too, feel like a return to a much older era.
In the 60s, though, TV was still widely considered the idiot box.
