There was a time, not so long ago, when watching TV was a communal event. Every evening, whole households would come together and watch whatever the powers that be at the big television stations decided they should watch. And this scene, of parents, children, elderly relatives – all phone and tablet-free – engrossed in just one shared screen, was replicated across the whole country.
This nightly ritual led to an extraordinary level of homogeneity in our viewing habits. For example, on Christmas Day 1986, over 30 million people watched Den Watts serve his wife Angie with divorce papers in EastEnders on BBC1. If the sheer scale of this audience – more than half of all people living in the UK at the time – was staggering, then its rapid decline is equally so. For by 2024, the flagship EastEnders Christmas Day special was bringing in fewer than 4 million viewers.
Viewer numbers plummeted with the introduction of streaming
This dramatic reduction in engagement with traditional TV channels is not confined to EastEnders Christmas specials. And whilst it might be easy to suggest viewers have simply grown tired of the lives of Albert Square’s finest, it is far more likely that this incredible drop in audience numbers is the result of a media ecosystem that now offers almost unlimited choice: from endless TV channels and streaming services to social media-driven content.
This explanation is supported by TV ratings across the board. Of the ten most-watched TV programmes in British television history (if you exclude one-off specials, such as sporting events and state funerals), only one of them aired this century – coincidentally another episode of EastEnders, this time from 2001, when it was revealed who had shot Phil Mitchell.
All of this may seem rather trivial. Who cares if fewer people are watching BBC1 or ITV and are instead choosing to watch a streaming service or listen to a podcast? But the impact of audiences moving away from communal TV viewing resonates deeply throughout the very fabric of society. As the population has splintered from broadcast TV channels and increasingly chosen to source more individualised online on-demand content, we have seen an erosion of a shared national story. As our viewing habits have become increasingly diffuse, so have we.
Mainstreaming
According to sociologist George Gerbner, exposure to the same TV content can lead to a process known as mainstreaming: “Mainstreaming is the process wherein consistent exposure to the same labels and images induces television viewers from diverse backgrounds to adopt a homogeneous outlook of the world.”
Gerbner, alongside fellow sociologist Professor Larry Gross, conducted research that led them to conclude that TV can independently contribute to the way people perceive social reality and will therefore affect the audience’s attitudes and values. If TV can drive diverse groups together by pushing them towards attitudes and values reflected on the screen, having half the population watching the same content every night is an incredible way of breaking down barriers between different groups.
However, when Gerbner and Gross’s findings are applied to modern viewing habits, it isn’t difficult to see the problem. If what we view really shapes our worldview so dramatically, then the fracturing of viewing habits into tiny, individualised packages is clearly a recipe for disaster in terms of social cohesion.
Viewing habits are forcing people apart
Not only is the shared experience of television no longer bringing us closer together, our modern viewing habits are actively forcing us further apart. Presented with a seemingly limitless choice of content, viewers are naturally drawn to that which reflects their pre-existing worldview. This self-selecting nature of modern media content, which is heightened by algorithms that push us towards content similar to that which we have already consumed, inevitably serves to entrench our beliefs.
If, as Gerbner and Gross concluded, TV can help shape our reality, and we are only watching TV that reflects our fixed belief structure, then this will naturally force us to retreat further inwards. Unchallenged by opposing views, we feel emboldened to demonise those who disagree with us, and over time the polarisation of society becomes stark and dangerous. TV stops being a window to the world and becomes yet another closed door – just one more echo chamber in the modern world.
All of this isn’t to suggest that the UK was once upon a time a nation united in political, social and historical harmony. Indeed, for much of TV’s ‘golden age’, a bitter and violent conflict raged in Northern Ireland, dividing the island of Ireland, along with parts of the UK, along religious, historical and political lines. But despite the many differences in the UK, the vast majority of the country lived within an agreed framework, a set of facts and undisputable truth upon which to hang differing opinions. That is what TV helped to create, and what has been increasingly lost as people move away from traditional broadcast television.
TV used to push against boundaries
In addition to mainstreaming the views of the nation and holding the population together within a centre ground of understanding, traditional broadcast TV also served the somewhat paradoxical role of pushing against these very boundaries. Whilst, by their design, the shows broadcast on traditional TV channels were moderate and safe – created to appeal to as broad a base of viewers as possible – it was this very characteristic that allowed TV, occasionally, to produce a moment, a character, or perhaps a whole show that moved the needle on hot-button social issues.
TV acted as a Trojan horse through which, every so often, the seed of a truly progressive movement could be smuggled into living rooms up and down the country. TV was unthreatening to middle England. TV wasn’t a protester screaming on the street corner. TV wasn’t an activist trying to force a strange and alien agenda upon them. No, TV was safe. TV was familiar. And it was through this cloak of familiarity that TV was able to subtly expose audiences to a new way of thinking. And perhaps nowhere was this effect felt more greatly than in attitudes towards the LGBTQ community in the UK.
TV helped LGBTQ acceptance
In less than 50 years, the UK went from a country where private homosexual acts were illegal to passing legislation in 2013 that legalised same-sex marriage. And it is hard to argue that TV didn’t play a significant role in this remarkable progress. In 1987, the first kiss between two gay characters was broadcast on British TV, when Colin Russell kissed his partner Barry Clark on the forehead. Two years later, the same two EastEnders characters shared the first ‘mouth-to-mouth’ kiss between two gay characters on British TV – the latter being watched by around 17 million people.
Whilst these two incidents were hardly radical, that was precisely the point. At the time, it is likely that the British public – and certainly the BBC commissioners – would not have been ready for any further representation of gay Britain. But a simple kiss nudged the boundaries slightly and helped push attitudes towards acceptance.
Attitudes toward homosexuality have changed slowly
In a 1983 survey, only 17% of Britons believed same-sex relationships were ‘not wrong at all,’ and 50% considered them ‘always wrong’. By 2023, this had changed dramatically, with 67% viewing same-sex relationships as ‘not wrong at all’, and only 9% considering them ‘always wrong’. Now of course, this shift in attitudes cannot be entirely attributed to TV. But it seems undeniable that a steady, safe exposure to gay characters – and, albeit heavily sanitised, gay life – helped lay the groundwork for such a dramatic shift.
This idea was thoroughly explored by British-Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell in his podcast Revisionist History, where he considered the impact of the sitcom Will & Grace – a show with a gay male lead – on societal attitudes to homosexuality in the US.
Whilst Will & Grace was criticised by some in the LGBTQ community for ducking key issues facing them, such as AIDS, or for playing to outdated stereotypes, the premise of having an openly gay lead, living an openly gay life, with other openly gay friends, was so radical at the time that its conception alone sent ripples of anxiety through the NBC studio that produced it. But this anxiety was misplaced, and Will & Grace became a much-loved, critically acclaimed show – one that was also the recipient of 83 Primetime Emmy nominations.
So yes, the writers might have had to tone down the ‘gayness’ in Will & Grace to make it palatable for a mass audience, but you do not change attitudes by playing to the gallery, or by preaching to the converted. You change attitudes by going to the masses and giving them just a little more than they thought they could handle. Will was gay, but he wasn’t too gay for middle America in the late 1990s. And that isn’t sanitising or pandering – that is effective messaging.
Endorsements for Will & Grace, and suicide discussion
In 2012, then Vice President Joe Biden stated, when addressing the debate about gay marriage and attitudes towards homosexuality in general: “I think Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far”. A position supported by The Smithsonian Institution’s LGBT+ history collection, which describes the sitcom as breaking ground by using “comedy to familiarise a mainstream audience with gay culture”.
It isn’t only in attitudes to marginal groups where TV can shift belief. It can also spark national debates on important but underrepresented issues. When, in the year 2000, EastEnders character Dot Cotton helped her friend, Ethel Skinner, kill herself in an assisted suicide storyline, the impact was stark and led to a great national debate. It also allowed for what is often a rather distant, faceless, and abstract issue to be brought to life through familiar and sympathetic characters. The impact of the storyline was also enduring, and as the Assisted Dying Bill makes its way through Parliament, it isn’t hard to imagine the Dot Cotton and Ethel Skinner storyline being in the minds of many lawmakers.
Controversial storylines can help us to understand history
And TV doesn’t just shape the way the public views the present or the future – it can help usher in a new perspective and understanding of the past. In 1979, a four-part docudrama called Holocaust aired in West Germany. The show starred a young Meryl Streep and centred on the fictional Josef Weiss, a kind and respected Jewish medical doctor, and his extended family. By the end of the series, most members of Josef Weiss’s family had perished at the hands of the Nazis.
The show was a huge hit (about half of West Germany’s population viewed some or all programmes in the series) and sparked deep national soul-searching across Germany. Following the broadcast, about 30,000 viewers called television stations, requesting information – asking as improbable and shocking questions as: How could it (the atrocities portrayed) happen? How many people knew? The impact of the series also filtered upwards towards lawmakers in Germany, and a few months after its broadcast, West Germany scrapped the statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes.
Books and documentary films about the Nazis and the Holocaust were hardly new in 1979, more than 30 years after the regime fell. But they did not excite the German population or spark the same intense national introspection as the mini-series aroused. The TV series, it seemed, was able to touch people in ways other mediums had failed to – by creating an emotional attachment between viewer and characters. And this phenomenon isn’t unique to Germany. Marvin J. Chomsky, the director of Holocaust, was also heavily involved in the ABC television show Roots, which aired in 1977. This mini-series about the experience of Africans and African Americans in slavery attracted enormous audiences. And Chomsky’s Roots did for the American public what Holocaust did for the Germans – shedding light on a long-neglected part of the American story and inspiring its audience to seek further information and understanding.
Streaming cannot have the same impact
Streaming services simply cannot achieve the sort of impact traditional TV once did. It isn’t that streaming services don’t make content that pushes boundaries. In fact, part of the extraordinary critical success of many of Netflix’s and Amazon’s biggest shows has been the freedom afforded to their creators to do just that. Shows like Heartstopper and Queer Eye pushed LGBT representation and LGBT relationships forward, whilst shows like Black Mirror explored a myriad of deep-rooted and complex social issues.
Free from the restraints of advertisers and free to appeal to specific demographics, these shows have spread their wings and cast aside the moderating chains of mainstreaming. But this creative freedom is a double-edged sword, and one that paradoxically weakens the medium’s ability to elicit real and meaningful change.
Where Will & Grace was, by virtue of its position as a primetime show on a major TV network, able to reach an audience either indifferent or perhaps even hostile to a homosexual lifestyle, the self-selecting nature of on-demand content means a similar show on Netflix is likely to only reach an audience already comfortable with and accepting of people from the LGBT community. So, although it is true that traditional broadcast TV shows might only be able to nudge at the boundaries of social norms, and that a streaming show can bulldoze over them, this more radical approach does not correlate to increased impact. It doesn’t matter how convincingly you portray your radical viewpoint – if your show is no longer tethered to the middle, it will no longer be ripe for mass consumption. And no matter how good your messaging is, you cannot move a population to act if you fail to reach the population in the first place.
And this issue extends far beyond sitcoms, and into the way we consume and understand major geopolitical issues. Many people will strongly oppose the way conflicts, humanitarian disasters and other global events are represented by the broadcast media. They will argue that these large institutions adhere to politically aligned agendas. And that these agendas are reflected in how they portray global events.
These people will point to the readily available and plentiful voices that offer differing perspectives and insights, through streaming shows, social media content and podcasts, as a positive development, arguing that this content allows audiences to be truly informed and educated.
The ongoing War in Gaza and the way it has been covered and portrayed by the major media outlets serves as a great example to highlight this argument. For many, western politicians and media outlets have been reluctant to portray the continuing humanitarian disaster in Gaza accurately. It is often argued that either due to the belief that impartiality means holding both sides equally accountable, or perhaps through political pressure, the major networks can no longer be trusted to accurately depict reality. This belief has led many people to feel it is necessary to switch off BBC and Sky, and instead switch on a foreign media outlet, or a YouTube channel.
But in the case of the Israel Gaza War, the same argument is being made by both opposing sides. The two groups on the extremes of the issue are both reaching the same conclusion but for polar opposite reasons. Those who view Israel’s actions as completely justified and correct, as well as those who believe Israel is committing genocide, and even the fringe of that group who don’t believe in Israel’s right to exist at all, are all turning away from broadcast content.
And what do they do? Of course, they turn to content that further entrenches their pre-held views, and thus the extremes move further apart, and society becomes more polarised.
Modern media content might be giving us access to more information, but if the information simply confirms what we already believe, is it really making us more informed?
Streaming doesn’t create a national discussion
As well as making boundary pushing entertainment shows, streaming services continue to produce fantastic and illuminating documentaries. None more so than Netflix’s award-winning 13th, which charts an astonishing story from slavery to the mass incarceration of young black men in the United States. But did the documentary compel a nation to collective soul-searching? Were viewers contacting Netflix to ask for more information, like those Germans who viewed Holocaust? Of course they weren’t, because only those with an already sympathetic view towards racial justice would choose to watch the documentary in the first place. The fact is, streaming services are, when it comes to shaping a national narrative or sparking a national debate, hamstrung by not only who watches them, but perhaps more vitally how they watch them.
The impact of shows in the past was always two-fold. The initial impact came from watching the show. Watching Dot assist her oldest and dearest friend in ending her life or watching the Nazis cart Jewish children away to a concentration camp hit with a real visceral thud that other mediums simply could not replicate. But the secondary impact – the one that really amplified the show – was the discussions it sparked the following day. On the bus, around the water cooler. And it is this that has been lost almost completely. When no one is watching the same show at the same time, the collective experience is lost. When you can’t discuss a show in the office because Karen in HR hasn’t finished the final episode or Darren in accounting doesn’t have that particular streaming service, how are you ever going to spark a national debate? The stories we consume shape us and our view of the world. We use stories to foster in our children positive characteristics. That is why we tell them stories of kind heroes to promote compassion, bravery, and honesty. Or we use cautionary tales, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, to illustrate the dangers of negative behaviour.
We are what we watch
Stories matter. And for a long time, the medium of television ensured we were all fed a similar diet. These stories – and TV, with its comforting familiarity – brought us all closer together, and allowed for the steady, if at times glacial, advancement of more progressive views. But when we all consume our own personalised, tailored content, when even families living in the same home are robbed of the chance to engage in a discussion around what has been viewed, our greater collective national story breaks down.
In just the same way social media can push us towards more extreme views, when we only watch that which already confirms our own biases, our thinking becomes entrenched – dividing society into ‘us’ and ‘them’, erasing shades of grey and extinguishing any nuanced thinking. Where once TV broke down barriers by exposing people, in a safe and familiar way, to a lifestyle, an opinion, or a worldview they disagreed with, streaming services are now throwing up walls. If we are what we watch, and we are all watching different things, can we really be surprised when the common ground between us erodes?
