When I close my eyes and daydream about 2025, I envision a wondrous, carefree future.
Oh, the United States just invaded Canada? Sorry, I can’t be bothered by that right now. I’m deep into the third act of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
RFK Jr. just inexplicably deadlifted a pony on live TV during a White House briefing on bird flu? I’ll get to that after I find out what’s in this promising locker from a 15-year-old Storage Wars rerun.
Call it escapism. Call it nihilism. I don’t care: I call it self-care. It’s likely going to be a strange year, so I’m going to do everything I can to provide some cushioning for my brain. And I’m going to start by uncutting the cord and resubscribing to cable TV.
Years ago, like most everyone else my age (I’m a super old millennial), I made the once bold and empowering decision to cut the cord. As I told Time Warner Cable to kick sand (but not too harshly; after all, I still needed them for my internet connection), I switched my Netflix plan to streaming and settled in for the golden age of on-demand entertainment.
A decade ago, the argument against cable was that you were paying for 400 channels when you only wanted 4. But fast-forward to today, and somehow, across my bevy of streaming services, I’m paying for 40,000 movies and series when I really only want 40.
Or, as Dak Dillon, editor-in-chief of broadcast industry trade pub NewscastStudio, told me, “In the olden days you had your cable bundle, you had your 200 channels, and that was it. And now, you have to flip-flop between nine different apps to find the one show you want to watch.”
Streaming is a veritable Cheesecake Factory menu with 40 pages of subpar options that leave you paralyzed—and, ultimately, hangry. So as the world turns, it’s time to return to simpler times.
THE PARADOX OF CHOICE
I recently dealt with some medical issues (all good now!), but laid up at a hospital or hotel, it was easy to forget them. That’s because I was rediscovering the sheer bliss of basic cable via fare like MTV’s The Challenge. When you’re watching cable, you render your smart TV wholly unintelligent—and free it from the apps and algorithms that endeavor to think they know what you want to watch (and what they would like you to watch).
TV programming is an inexact science dictated by ratings, advertising, the day of the week and hour, and, crucially, the cost of creating shows, which yields a blend of both high-quality drama and low-culture reality TV. It’s a soupy mix that is not directly for any one person, but rather a general version of . . . us.
The result? Surprise! Delight!
A discovery that you haven’t watched Speed in 20-plus years, and it indeed holds up. The somewhat seismic realization that Independence Day: Resurgence was actually rather forward-thinking as a sequel when it came to its sci-fi world-building.
Moreover, like that Cheesecake Factory menu, streaming makes it entirely possible to have too much choice. Which is exactly what psychologist Barry Schwartz espouses in his TED Talk and book, The Paradox of Choice.
In his talk, Schwartz offers a study on workplace mutual fund benefits. Its author found that for every 10 additional funds businesses offered employees, the number taking advantage of the benefit dropped by 2%. In other words, he recapped, if a company offered 50 funds, participation dropped off by 10%. It’s just too hard to choose. So people didn’t. And by that point, they lost out on free money.
According to Schwartz, if you do make a choice on something in a sea of options, you end up less happy with the result than if you’d had fewer choices to begin with—because, among other reasons, you wonder whether you’ve made the correct decision. So you feel regret.
Anyway! It’s all a roundabout way to say that choice can in fact suck, particularly when you’re parsing the aforementioned 40,000 movies when you just want to relax.
Life is exhausting. Entertainment shouldn’t be.
TUNING IN AND TUNING OUT
Of course, there are endless other reasons to hate on streaming services these days, which all endured and escalated in 2024.
There’s the nightmarish UX. (Ever lose yourself in a rage blackout by trying to accomplish a task as simple as turning subtitles on or off?!) There’s the lazy branding ecosystem, whereby a plus sign stands in for any remotely creative alternative.
There are the constant price hikes (seen this year across nearly every platform). The ad-supported tiers on Netflix and elsewhere. The death of the shared password. The bundles! And now the live sporting events that sometimes work.
It all feels very much like . . . cable.
Still, despite the ubiquity of streaming apps, they’re not exactly all in the black. “There are a lot of accounting tricks that make them look like they’re about to reach profitability,” Dillon tells me. This year Netflix announced it would stop releasing subscriber numbers; for posterity, at last count, it reported 283 million paid memberships. Dillon adds that cable networks had the boon of two income streams: advertising and carriage fees. Streamers often lack those dual profit centers, and also absorb the costs of marketing, customer support—“all these pieces of the process that in the past Charter or Xfinity was responsible for,” Dillon says.
Of course, that doesn’t mean cable is doing great, either. According to Forbes, it flew high into the early 2010s, when it was in 105 million—or 90%—of U.S. households. This was the era of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead. But all that cord-cutting came at a clear cost, and collectively we did cable dirty. As Dillon reported in August, Warner Bros. Discovery announced a $9.1 billion devaluation of its cable biz, Paramount reported a $5.98 billion devaluation of its own, and so on. Still, he noted, analysts predict that a group of some 50 million household subscribers will continue to carry the cable torch forward.
Sure, that’s likely an army of boomers and others resistant to change, soon to include me. But could cable, like other hallmarks of the 1990s, find itself in Gen Z’s embrace? Could the empire truly strike back and disrupt its former disruptors?
Ultimately, when it comes to streaming apps and the future, “There are too many services, and there’s going to be consolidation,” Dillon says. “There’s just no way that they can keep propping up these services and not making money. That merry-go-round is going to stop spinning pretty soon.”
All I know is that not long ago, a friend and I went backpacking. We had hiked 8 miles into the forest, and then we ran into a bear and its cubs. It scared the bejesus out of us, and there were no sound campsites nearby, so we turned around and hiked 8 miles out and checked into a hotel. It had cable. Forrest Gump was on. And as my friend reminisced last week when discussing cable, it was like a spa.
I look at the calendar and I see some bears coming. There has never been a better time to tune out, and tune in.
