The rise of ambient TV: Why shows are getting easier to watch in the background

In a desperate attempt for television that respects my attention span, I turn on Bravo’s reality show, The Real Housewives of Rhode Island. It is the franchise’s latest edition, and it is Messy with a capital M. Housewife Rulla’s husband is cheating on her and she refuses to believe it. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, after all. Another housewife, Jo-Ellen, brings proof—how she got them is a question nobody is brave enough to ask. “Every morning he (Brian) goes to her (the mistress) house, and brings her coffee. Every single morning,” Jo-Ellen tells Rulla. To which, she replies, “He’s at the gym every morning.” “Does Brian look like he goes to the gym?” Jo-Ellen retorts. My jaw drops.

You see, there would have been no dropping of the jaw if I was watching a scripted show. Nearly everything else out there right now seems like it has been made to watch ambiently—a term that caught on post-Covid for shows that play in the background while you go about your life.

I’ve watched the entirety of Emily in Paris (the reigning champion of ambient TV) while on some sort of side quest every season, and I can still tell the protagonist Emily is more indecisive than a Libra. Don’t even get me started on And Just Like That...— it took seven rewatches of Sex and the City to recover.

It is common knowledge that TV is increasingly being written for people on their phones, for the simple reason that we, in fact, are on our phones. And with this rise of second-screen viewers, streaming services have started accommodating them by reiterating plotlines over and over (and over, and over, and just to be safe, over again). Canada-based scholar Daphne Rena Idiz, in conversation with European film creatives who’ve worked on Netflix originals, once described how the platform internally flags certain series as “second-screen shows.” The result is cliffhanger after cliffhanger to keep you hooked, with an ending you barely register because you were never fully there to begin with, and would’ve stopped a long time ago if you had been paying any attention.

Second screens aren’t the only reason showrunners stopped giving a damn though. There is also the spoiler economy online, which makes binge-watching the only safe option (and even then, you might get got). There’s our deteriorating attention spans, thank you META. And not to mention, the sheer glut of content, so abundant and so easy to access that it feels overwhelming.

Who's really to blame

And, this isn’t just a viewer’s paranoid theory, it’s coming from the people in the room. On The Romesh Ranganathan Show, British actor and activist Jameela Jamil talked about how there is a directive handed down by big studios to filmmakers to simplify the plot, because people are on their phones. “In TV shows, even with good actors, they’re saying really obvious things about what’s happening. They’re laying out the entire plotline,” she explains, adding: “The language has become really bait and on the nose, and that’s because the writers are being told that they have to write in a way that someone can carry on with doomscrolling or shopping online while following it in the background.” She argues how this purposeful dumbing down of content is leading to a less nuanced, a less interesting, and a less thoughtful society.

It’s one thing to suspect television is coddling you. It’s another to hear, from someone who has been in the business, that coddling may now be the assignment.

Before you mistake this for some vapid cultural criticism, it is important to remember that this generation has also seen some of the sharpest television ever made: Pluribus, Industry, Severance, Succession, and the like. One thing they all have in common is a weekly drop, leaving less room for spoilers, more for really sitting with an episode and your thoughts on it. While I can’t speak for everyone, I seem to have my attention span intact and not traded in for that of a doorknob’s.

I would rather TV started taking risks again. There are only so many reruns I can watch before nostalgia wears thin, and there are only so many days I can spend wondering whether Brian really goes to the gym every morning. We all know he doesn’t. 

All images: IMDb

This article originally appeared in Cosmopolitan India's July-August 2026 print issue.

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