I believe we can become earnest again. We can know what we know about the world, keep our capacity to recognise cruelty and deception, and still recover the ability to meet something warm without immediately searching for the reason it must be false. But recovering that ability on a cultural scale would take an enormous, conscious refusal. We would have to stop allowing the most cynical environments we inhabit to decide what counts as intelligence, what deserves our attention, and how embarrassed we should feel about caring.
An old sitcom can make that loss unusually clear. Somewhere between the opening music, the familiar room and the arrival of a character whose faults you already know, there is an invitation to relax your guard. The programme assumes you might enjoy spending time with these people. It allows a reconciliation to mean something. It can make a joke about a person without requiring you to despise them. Its emotional vocabulary includes affection, and it does not always feel compelled to apologise for using it.
That is what I mean by guilelessness. A willingness to offer a feeling without first constructing an escape route from it. A belief that an audience might accept a moment of tenderness in the spirit in which it was offered. The kind of television I am thinking of flourished in the 1980s and 1990s, and I think one reason its atmosphere can feel difficult to reproduce now is that we so rarely leave the machinery of public suspicion behind. The internet travels with us. Its judgements follow us into the room. We can be watching an entirely different screen and still be listening for its laughter.
I have made 90s.myretrotvs.com my homepage. My invitation is simple: spend half an hour there. Let yourself encounter the texture of another television environment. Give the commercials some of your time, too. Resist the impulse to turn every dated hairstyle, exaggerated performance or cheerful promise into evidence of how much cleverer we have become. Notice what you feel when you stop preparing a verdict. There may be something in that small experience worth taking seriously.
The permission an old sitcom offered
The appeal of a familiar sitcom is partly architectural. You return to the same rooms. People enter through doors you recognise. A disagreement develops inside a world whose basic contours remain intact. A character can behave foolishly without being expelled from the story forever. The programme creates a place where failure can be endured, understood and sometimes forgiven. Its repetition gives affection somewhere to accumulate.
This is especially visible in the family sitcom, where the resolution can seem almost unbearably direct to a viewer accustomed to emotional qualifications. Someone admits they were wrong. Someone explains why they were hurt. The music changes, and the audience is asked to stay with an ordinary human feeling. You can object to the writing. You can find the lesson simplistic or the sentiment unearned. Sometimes it is. Yet the existence of an imperfect attempt at sincerity does not make sincerity itself an embarrassing artistic mistake.
There was craft in making those rooms feel habitable. Timing, casting, repetition and the gradual development of relationships made a familiar entrance pleasurable. The audience learned how a person would misunderstand something, what they were afraid of, and which other character could reach them. Even a predictable resolution could become satisfying because the attachment was real. We were being invited to care about people who would still be there next week.
Of course, the decades themselves were not innocent. Seinfeld belongs to that history, as do the barbs of Married... with Children and the satire of The Simpsons. Even warm programmes could be cruel, exclusionary or complacent. Their domestic security was distributed unevenly, and some viewers were expected to laugh at versions of themselves that afforded them little dignity. Remembering television honestly means keeping those failures in view. The past cannot serve as evidence that everybody once felt safe.
My interest is in an emotional permission that some of those programmes offered, and in the conditions under which an audience could accept it. That permission can be recovered without restoring the exclusions around it. In fact, a more generous culture should extend the right to feel at home to people the old television household left outside. There is nothing worth reclaiming in warmth that depends on somebody else remaining the joke.
The internet does not show us everything equally
The internet can feel like a mirror held against our species at every hour of the day. Open it and there is another humiliation, another betrayal, another person behaving with astonishing cruelty. We carry this mirror in our pockets and raise it to our faces before we have properly entered the morning. Eventually, the distinction between what people are like and what the feed repeatedly selects becomes difficult to maintain.
That distinction matters because a feed is an arrangement. Someone chooses what it rewards; systems decide what to repeat. The ordinary kindness of a person making a meal for a neighbour may never become visible to us, while a stranger's worst thirty seconds travels across the world. Both belong to humanity. Only one may be presented with the frequency and intensity required to shape our expectations of everyone else. Constant access can produce the sensation of comprehensive knowledge while delivering a highly selective emotional education.
Research gives us grounds to take those incentives seriously. A 2021 study by William Brady and colleagues, combining observations of Twitter with behavioural experiments, found that positive feedback for expressions of moral outrage could encourage subsequent outrage expression. Users also adapted to the expressive norms around them. That finding concerns what people express, and it does not establish that every participant becomes inwardly more cynical. It does show how an online environment can teach a manner of public response. [1]
In another 2021 study, Steve Rathje and colleagues analysed posts from US congressional members and news media accounts on Facebook and Twitter. References to political opponents were especially associated with sharing. The scope is specific: political communication in those datasets. It cannot explain the whole of contemporary entertainment. Still, it helps make one part of the problem concrete. Hostility can receive rewards that quieter forms of engagement struggle to match. [2]
My argument about sitcoms is an interpretation of a wider cultural atmosphere, not a result established by those studies. Television changes for many reasons, including production economics, distribution and the fragmentation of audiences. The old broadcast world cannot be reconstructed by blaming a phone. But the habits we acquire in one environment do not necessarily disappear when we enter another. If we spend hours practising suspicion, it seems reasonable to ask what happens when a story asks us to trust it.
The audience in our heads
One of the internet's most exhausting effects is the imagined observer it installs beside an experience. You hear a piece of music and almost immediately anticipate the person who would call it sentimental. You enjoy a film and begin preparing a defence against objections you have not yet encountered. You see somebody expressing unguarded enthusiasm and feel, before anything else, the danger of their exposure. The anticipated comment arrives before your own response has finished forming.
That observer can make cynicism feel like social competence. If you identify the manipulation first, nobody can accuse you of being manipulated. If you mock the emotional scene, nobody can catch you being moved by it. If you insist that everything is a transaction, you never have to risk looking like the person who believed in a gift. There are reasons people learn these habits. Disappointment teaches caution, and public ridicule can be merciless. But a defence that never comes down also keeps out experiences we wanted to protect.
Scepticism remains necessary. It asks whether a claim is true, whether a promise has evidence behind it, whether a person with power is abusing that power. Cynicism becomes destructive when it supplies the answer before the encounter has happened. Kindness must conceal an ulterior motive. Enthusiasm must be a performance. Hope must expose a failure to understand reality. Once that presumption settles in, evidence of goodness is treated as a trick, while evidence of cruelty is welcomed as confirmation.
This is why another warm television programme cannot, by itself, settle the question. The problem is larger than whether contemporary writers can produce kind characters. They can. A successful story about decency may offer real relief, but the deeper issue is whether we can inhabit that feeling outside the protected duration of a programme. We cannot keep reserving tenderness for exceptional works of entertainment while treating it as an intellectual liability everywhere else.
I miss the possibility of an ordinary welcome. A programme does not have to congratulate itself for being hopeful. A person does not have to announce that they are choosing vulnerability. There can simply be a joke, a room, somebody returning home, and enough trust between the work and its audience for that small event to matter. When every sincere gesture has to defend its existence, sincerity spends much of its energy explaining itself.
Attention needs somewhere to stay
Attention spans belong in this conversation, although I am wary of the easy claim that people have become incapable of concentrating. People still give hours to games, books, films and subjects they love. A long essay can find a reader. The more useful question is what our everyday environments encourage us to do with attention, and what kinds of feeling become difficult when interruption is the expected condition.
A sitcom asks you to remain with an exchange long enough for its rhythm to work. You need the setup, the misunderstanding, the hesitation before the reply. The emotional resolution often depends on accumulated familiarity. If you keep leaving the room in your mind, you may encounter only the bare outline of the sentiment. Without the time that earns it, a tender moment can look like a demand to feel something on command. Distraction can help produce the very shallowness we then accuse the programme of possessing.
The feed invites a different habit. Each item has a few moments to justify its presence before we move on. Certainty, outrage and ridicule can establish themselves quickly. A complicated person takes longer. So does a change of heart. So does the recognition that an awkward attempt to say something kind might deserve patience. When fast judgement becomes our default pace, we can mistake the speed of our dismissal for the quality of our understanding.
I think earnestness needs time in this practical sense. It needs the delay between an initial embarrassment and the decision to listen anyway. It needs enough attention for another person's intention to become clearer than their imperfect delivery. You can know that an old scene uses familiar devices and still remain open to what the actors are doing inside them. Awareness of construction does not oblige us to refuse the experience. We understand how a song is made and still allow it to move us.
Reclaiming attention therefore involves more than being productive or getting through a reading list. It concerns the length of time we are willing to grant something before deciding what it is worth. A culture that grants almost nothing that time will struggle to sustain generosity. We need occasions on which the next thing does not immediately win merely because it is next.
Why even a commercial break can feel different
There is something revealing about missing the texture of old commercial breaks. Advertising was already trying to sell us things. It cultivated insecurity, narrowed ideas of beauty and happiness, and made promises no product could keep. A cheerful voice did not make the commercial innocent. I am not asking anyone to forget what advertising does.
Yet a conventional television break had a discernible boundary. The programme paused; the sales pitch arrived; the programme returned. You might leave the room, talk to someone, make a drink or simply wait. The interruption belonged to a schedule larger than your individual reaction. It did not require you to contribute a public opinion about every image that passed in front of you.
Remembered from within a continually updating feed, even that imperfect arrangement can suggest a form of relief. A break could be a break. The cheerful insistence of a jingle could remain a small, dated piece of performance, without an attached conversation telling you which kind of person you would be for enjoying it. There was room to be amused by something without first establishing your distance from it.
This is the sense in which I think the experience can be good for the soul. I mean the loosening of a habit: the feeling that you do not have to prosecute everything you encounter. You can let an ordinary piece of cultural debris be ordinary. You can recognise its absurdity affectionately. You can enjoy a performance while understanding perfectly well that someone was trying to sell cereal.
My90sTV is itself an internet project, which makes it a useful complication to any simple argument against technology. Its virtual television offers a way to channel-surf material from another period. The medium carrying the refuge is also the medium I am questioning. That should tell us something. The internet can be arranged around curiosity, memory and pleasure. The experience we have come to accept as inevitable is only one set of choices about how to organise our time. [3]
A worldwide refusal would have to be practical
The scale of the change matters. A person can close an app and feel better for an evening, then return to a workplace, social circle or public conversation in which permanent defensiveness still seems compulsory. Individual relief is valuable, but it does not automatically change the atmosphere everyone else has to breathe. If we want earnestness to become ordinary again, enough people have to make it socially possible for one another.
A conscious rejection of cynicism around the world would be enormous because the habits are woven into so many ordinary activities. We use the same devices to work, maintain friendships, find art and encounter the machinery that exhausts us. Leaving can have real costs, particularly for people whose communities are difficult to reach elsewhere. A serious cultural change has to make better forms of connection available. It cannot consist solely of telling tired people to exercise more discipline.
It would begin wherever we have some influence over the tone of an encounter. A friend shares something they love: we can let them finish before making the joke that reduces it. Someone makes a minor mistake: we can decide that an audience does not need to be assembled around their embarrassment. An artist attempts something emotionally direct: we can assess the work without treating the attempt itself as evidence of stupidity. These decisions are small, but they establish what other people can risk in our company.
Creators would have work to do as well. Earnestness does not excuse lazy writing, and kindness becomes more convincing when characters face consequences and contradictions. A generous comedy can be sharply observant. Its people can be selfish, ridiculous and wrong. What matters is whether the work remains interested in their humanity after it has exposed their faults. The possibility of repair gives a story somewhere to go beyond the satisfaction of catching somebody out.
The organisations that distribute culture also make choices. They can make room for work that develops slowly, preserve access to complete works rather than only isolated moments, and give audiences ways to choose experiences with an ending. Platforms can offer more control over recommendation and interruption. None of these changes guarantees generosity. They would, however, give it a less hostile place to develop. We should expect more than a campaign asking users to be nicer inside systems that reward their worst responses.
There is also a danger in turning the rejection of cynicism into another occasion for contempt. People who rely on irony are not our enemies. Often they are exhausted, disappointed or trying to remain socially safe. Mocking them for being unable to believe would repeat the very habit we are trying to interrupt. A warmer culture needs ways for people to lower their guard without being punished for having needed it.
Nor should warmth become an instruction to stop objecting to injustice. Anger can be justified. Satire can reveal what politeness conceals. Some situations demand refusal, confrontation and sustained scrutiny. The aim is to recover the freedom to respond appropriately, instead of arriving at every situation with contempt already selected. We can take suffering seriously without making cruelty the organising principle of our own attention.
I will always believe we can do this
The guilelessness available to us now will have to accommodate what we know. We cannot undo experience, and we should not want to surrender the insights that have made more people visible. What we can recover is the willingness to participate in a good moment without treating our participation as a failure of intelligence. We can allow understanding to deepen affection instead of automatically dissolving it.
That is why I keep returning to the old sitcom room. The furniture and clothes belong to their period, but the desire underneath them has not become obsolete. People still want somewhere to arrive. They still want to be funny without being vicious, mistaken without being irredeemable, loved without having to perform invulnerability. A familiar programme can remind us how little explanation those desires require when we stop treating them with suspicion.
So spend half an hour. Let something take longer than a clip. Stay through an awkward scene. If a commercial appears, watch it with the knowledge that it is a commercial and the freedom to enjoy its strange little confidence. You do not have to declare the past superior. Simply notice whether another rhythm gives you access to a part of yourself that the usual rhythm keeps interrupting.
Then bring some of that patience back into the present. Give it to a conversation, a new work of art, somebody who is trying to tell you what they love. The old programmes are useful if they help us recognise a possibility we can practise now. There are people living beside us who would welcome that same permission to be unguarded.
I believe a change that large is possible because a culture is also made of repeated permissions. What we reward, what we ridicule, what we allow to pass without punishment: these become the terms on which other people meet us. We have spent a long time making earnestness feel dangerous. We can begin making it feel welcome, and we can ask our institutions and technologies to support that choice.
Imagine that happening widely enough that a warm moment no longer feels like an exception requiring an explanation. Imagine people carrying their knowledge of the world without having to display their disappointment in every encounter. We would still have difficult work to do. We might become more capable of doing it together.
We can do this. I will always believe that!
Sources
1. William J. Brady, Killian McLoughlin, Tuan N. Doan and Molly J. Crockett. How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks. Science Advances, 2021. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8363141/
2. Steve Rathje, Jay J. Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden. Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8256037/
3. My90sTV and the MyRetroTVs guide. https://90s.myretrotvs.com/ and https://www.myretrotvs.com/
