Discussed: Industrial design, television history, “two screen experiences,” architecture, Eurovision Song Contest, soccer, snobbery.
One night in May, I was just about to fall asleep when I heard cheering outside my window.
“That must be for Nemo,” I thought. Sure enough, I read the next morning that Switzerland, represented by Nemo, had won the Eurovision Song Contest.
A few weeks later, I was in the kitchen when I heard even louder cheering. Switzerland had just scored a goal against Italy. At this, my wife and I went to her parents’ apartment to watch the game. We went to their place because, almost a year after moving here, we still haven’t replaced our TV.
I say this self-consciously. “I don’t own a TV” was, for most of my life, something snobs said. It was code that you were either too intellectual or too busy to bother with sitcoms and game shows. You preferred operas without the soap. XKCD even ran a cartoon about this in 2013:
That trend line is accurate, and we’re firmly on the neutral line now; admitting you don’t own a TV is neither stuffy nor shameful. Prestige TV and its descendants made television as artistically respected as it's ever been,1 while the end of cable and the rise of streaming made the device itself less important than ever. You don’t need a TV to watch TV. I keep up with shows and movies on tablets and computers. What we used to call a “TV set” is just another screen among many in our lives. It’s usually the biggest one we own. It’s also usually the ugliest to look at and the clumsiest to use.
We haven’t bought a TV for the same reason we don’t have enough chairs at our table or rugs on our floor: We don’t want to spend a lot of money on something we don’t like having around.
This aversion boils down to two factors—one internal to the TV, the other external. Internally, TVs are a mess. The software on smart TVs is often larded with spying features and is consistently, obnoxiously unintuitive. A simple monitor with no additional features is an increasingly hard-to-find option. When we do find one, we hit the external challenge: TVs are a dead end of design.
Even if we avoid models with flimsy plastic bezels or a needlessly bulky stand, a TV will be a gigantic dark rectangle on our wall. When the TV isn’t on, it’s a void. Some of the stock TV screensavers are impressive—up-close nature footage and drone flyovers of exotic cities, all shot in mind-bendingly sharp resolution. But the novelty wears off, and when they play on a loop, the screen savers give a room all the charm of a Best Buy before a big sale.
Samsung offers the most novel solution to the void problem with the Frame, a TV with a matte screen that hides itself as a painting whenever it’s not in use. I went to a few stores to check these out in person. Watching an imitation of an oil painting give way to a live soccer game is like being in a science fiction scene, but not an especially new scene. A TV that spends most of its time disguised as a work of art is an idea from an era when not owning a TV was a sign of sophistication. It’s a $2,000 object that tells the world how reluctantly it was made. It’s also cutting-edge technology with a centuries-old form factor. In all of our aesthetic evolution, have we not found any other way to think of a rectangle? Are our choices either a void or an illusion?
For the price we pay for a television, and for the prominence it holds in our homes, a TV should be more than a blank space or an imitation of something else. Instead of pretending to be an old work of art, it should look like a channel for new works of art. I don’t know what exactly this looks like, but neither do TV manufacturers, and it’s their job to come up with these things. Nobody, it seems, is designing for the future. They’re barely designing for the present.
In the early years of television, manufacturers put TVs in cabinets of carved wood. The cabinets weren’t just decorative, they solved problems. TVs were strange new contraptions and dressing them up like furniture made them seem more familiar. The big wood boxes were also necessary to hide a lot of heavy and bulky electronic components. As the guts of a TV got slimmer and lighter, the need to design around them went away, and sets became bleakly minimalist.
But the old cabinet TVs weren’t just decoration, they were a sign the manufacturer was thinking about the customer. Old TVs entered homes politely and tried to stand alongside other pieces of furniture, even if all that furniture was arranged around the TV. Modern TVs barge in. They demand space and offer no aesthetic reward as objects. Manufacturers see customers’ homes the same way they see TVs—they all look the same and the only difference is the size.
“Despite more advanced manufacturing and design technologies than have existed in human history, our built environment tends overwhelmingly toward the insubstantial, the flat, and the gray, punctuated here and there by the occasional childish squiggle,” reads an essay in N+1 called “Why Is Everything So Ugly?” The pervasive drabness the piece describes is, in part, the result of manufacturers’ hostile indifference toward the buyer.
It occurs to us, strolling past a pair of broken BuzzFeed Shopping–approved AirPods, that the new ugliness has beset us from both above and below. Many of the aesthetic qualities pioneered by low-interest-rate-era construction — genericism, non-ornamentation, shoddy reproducibility — have trickled down into other realms, even as other principles, unleashed concurrently by Apple’s slick industrial-design hegemon, have trickled up. In the middle, all that is solid melts into sameness, such that smart home devices resemble the buildings they surveil, which in turn look like the computers on which they were algorithmically engineered, which resemble the desks on which they sit, which, like the sofas at the coworking space around the corner, put the mid in fake midcentury modern. And all of it is bound by the commandment of planned obsolescence, which decays buildings even as it turns phones into bricks.
We’re going to buy gadgets anyway, and we’ll replace them soon enough, so why bother making them interesting to look at in the meantime?
It’s not just fussiness about design that stops us from putting a TV in our apartment. By not buying a TV, we’re avoiding the inevitable need to replace a TV. And every day between the purchase and the replacement, the big drab rectangle in our living room would remind us of our compromise.
I miss having a TV, though. The feeling of sitting and watching a soccer game in a group isn’t possible with an iPad. We can’t invite people over to watch a movie full-screen on my desktop computer. The TV can be an appliance that builds community—a piece of furniture that connects.
Form should follow function. A device that has a central place in a home should earn that place. But function follows form with new TVs. Maybe there’s no better sign of this than the fact that the types of shows that made a TV so essential a decade ago are now crowded out by programs designed to be a part of a “two-screen experience”—streaming shows designed to be played in the background, movies padded with empty space so viewers can follow without paying attention. The big bland box on the wall is too easily a vessel for boring bland programming.
Shows like this, and the devices they play on, just aren’t worth looking at.
This is not to say there wasn’t good TV before the “prestige” era. There was a lot of really good TV. The shows that inspired the label, though, lifted some of the stigma that certain critics placed on the medium. Maybe the clearest sign of this is the widespread acceptance of the adjective “prestige” to describe the shows.