Dumbing down TV: Are simple shows overtaking complex storytelling?

TV executives don’t want viewers to get distracted by their phones. Photo / 123rf
Audiences are too distracted by their phones to focus – and execs are encouraging them. Is this the end for complex, original storytelling?
It sounds like the name of a Hollywood horror. “The Second Screen,” a voiceover would boom at the end of its trailer, “the most terrifying movie event of the year. Coming soon to a cinema near you.” The truth is, that phrase is already here, in Hollywood at least, and striking more fear into filmmakers than a thousand Longlegs or Alien: Romuluses.
In 2023, a study by United States data firm Civic Science revealed that 66% of Americans watching TV do so while browsing their mobile phone. Streaming shows and movies while simultaneously checking social media or messaging friends is now so commonplace that the TVs in our homes are no longer our first priority when we’re unwinding at the end of the day, taking in entertainment – they’re second. Hence the term “second screen”.
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Over the past few years, the film and TV industry has begun to scramble to adjust its content accordingly. “Can we make it more second screen?” is the feedback storytellers have been receiving on their scripts with increasing regularity (myself included, in my own work as a screenwriter). The term means, “This is too engaging for our audience. Tone it down. Make it simpler, make it easier to follow while sending an email or scrolling through Instagram,” says Justine Bateman, star of shows like Family Ties, writer-director of movies like 2021′s cult acclaimed Violet and one of the most notable voices in the strikes that drew Hollywood to a standstill last year.
The phrase, she says, is essentially dumbing down TV – the sector of the industry where its impact is being most keenly felt. In previous decades, series could feature labyrinthine plots and multi-layered characters, leading to the much-discussed era of “peak TV” typified by shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men. Now, networks and streaming services are demanding shows that viewers can follow along with while exploring TikTok at the same time.
“The fear is that if you look away for 10 minutes to get into a Twitter fight or whatever, when you look back at the show, you’ll be confused,” Bateman continues, explaining the rationale among TV execs. “And they don’t want that. The fear is that if something is too interesting, someone’s going to shut it off because it’s making too many demands of them.” The result is less sophisticated narratives. Fewer twists and turns. More one-note protagonists. And more exposition, repeatedly reminding the audience who is who on their screens at any given time. Bateman adds: “I think it’s a crime against filmmaking and a betrayal of everyone at home, honestly.”
It’s not just a case of existing shows being simplified to make them more palatable to viewers distracted by their phones and tablets. Neither is it simply affecting what shows are popular amongst audiences: 2023′s most-streamed show in the US wasn’t The Last Of Us or Succession, but glossy, easy-to-watch American procedural series Suits.
Now, it’s ushering in even bigger changes in Hollywood. In a cut-throat competitive streaming market that has seen even Netflix struggle to maintain subscribers, industry insiders are predicting a move away from the sorts of ambitious storytelling on which the streaming boom was predicated – the tonal weirdness of BoJack Horseman, the trippy experimentalism of The OA and so on – into what Bateman calls “a sort of visual muzak. The TV equivalent of the background music you’d hear in an elevator or doctor’s office waiting room.”
In Hollywood, this is being referred to as “second screen pitching” – as acknowledged in a conversation between Stranger Things actor David Harbour and radio personality Miquita Oliver on the latter’s Miss Me podcast last month. “[Studios] are asking for ideas that people will kind of ignore, so they can be on their phone,” said Oliver.
“It’s already happening,” one source at a popular streaming service says, asking to remain anonymous. “We’re seeing more and more reality shows commissioned. If you log in to Netflix, you’ll see Selling Sunset and Love Is Blind. These shows are much more second screen-friendly.”
There are plenty of incentives for streamers to do this, entwined in the streaming landscape’s move to a more ad-supported model of late. This year, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Disney all began rolling out ad breaks in their content for viewers on certain price plans. Shows don’t need to be watched, necessarily, for these platforms to profit under this new model – they simply have to not be turned off, so more ads can be shown. But the anonymous executive quoted above makes a good point: “Streamers are just adapting to what audiences are doing. Their consumption habits [viewing shows while scrolling phones and laptops] are a reality of the modern world. We’re just trying to accommodate that.”
That much is certainly true. Britons clocked up, on average, six hours and eight minutes per day on digital devices last year according to one study – a figure on the rise after Covid-19. In his book Stolen Focus, the author Johann Hari describes a culture of addiction around smartphones that has led to decreased ability to follow long-form narrative content, whether that be a book, film or TV show.
So how to fix the second screen conundrum? One option is to wait it out – surely viewers will grow tired of bite-sized content and crave stories that can take them on intellectual and emotional journeys that a 60-second TikTok could never do.
Another idea is to essentially move TV on to audiences’ phones with innovative new content – though ideas like this have crashed and burned spectacularly when trialled before. In 2018, a new streaming service named Quibi launched offering bitesize shows, accessible exclusively on mobile devices. The idea, instead of attempting to distract users’ attention away from their phones and back to their TVs, was to offer the content on those phones. Steven Spielberg was said to be among the creators reportedly working on ideas for the platform – in 2019, founder Jeffrey Katzenberg claimed the icon of cinema was penning a horror series that users would only be able to access at nighttime, unlocking when the phone’s weather app acknowledges that it’s dark out. Quibi went bust before the project ever came to fruition.
Bateman’s attempt at a solution is a film festival, named Credo 23. To her, the problem of studios demanding more “second screen” content is a cousin to other problems in the industry, such as studios insisting upon the use of AI to cut costs and hire fewer workers. “It’s a showcase of non-AI generated filmmaking and non-second screen filmmaking,” she says of the event, coming to Los Angeles in March 2025. The movies screened will hark back to an “era where the focus was to make the best damn series or film you could possibly make”, she says.
“Second screen,” in other words, is a product of TV slipping into second place in the priorities of audiences when it comes to their entertainment. How Hollywood responds in the coming years might define whether the medium lives on – or switches off entirely.
Why compete with memes on viewers’ phones when you could adapt those memes into actual TV shows? This lighter-than-a-lemon-drizzle reality show took a TikTok trend from 2020 in which people guessed whether items were real or cake replicas, and oven-baked it into second-screen-era streaming gold.
2021′s Squid Game was a surprise smash for Netflix – a twisty thriller, made in Korea but embraced worldwide. Its ensemble cast, knotty plot and subtitles made it a tricky sell for second-screen viewers, though. For those audiences, step forward this reality show replicating the high-stakes games of the original – this time in English, with zero pesky plot.
See also: Friends. In a time of second-screen viewing, audiences are flocking to comfort-watch comedies they’ve seen a hundred times before. Why? Because if they miss a chunk of an episode while they watch an Instagram reel of a sea otter, it doesn’t matter – they know what happened from previous viewings and can pick the plot back up with ease.
This legal drama starring Meghan Markle ran for nine seasons on the USA Network, to zero fanfare, without ever troubling the zeitgeist. Three years after its finale, the show enjoyed an unexpected explosion in popularity after being syndicated by Netflix, who presumably anticipated its low-stakes plots and easy-to-follow procedural format would appeal to second-screen viewers.
In 2023, Netflix subscribers spent 273.7 million hours watching this British dating series’ fourth season, according to the streaming platform. And no wonder. The format – in which single people get engaged before meeting in person – might be something that could have existed on Channel 4 in the 2000s, but its simplicity makes the show second-screen suitable, perfect for watching while doom-swiping the dating app Hinge.
Was Netflix’s 2022 actioner simply a bad movie, or something more depressing? The film – directed by Avengers: Infinity War duo the Russo Brothers – was accused by critics of being optimised for a culture in which audiences aren’t really paying attention, raising their heads for big explosions only. It was a success nonetheless: 43.55 million viewers watched it in three days upon release.
It may have since gotten bogged down in complex Star Wars lore, but Disney’s flagship show became a hit faster than audiences could say “Baby Yoda” when it first aired in 2019, in part thanks to a number of second-screen-friendly components. Its brief runtime compared with prestige series (often in the 30-minute range) demanded less attention-investment from distracted viewers, while its format – the bounty hunter lands on a different planet each episode, battles a villain, then flies home – made it easy to drop in and out of.
A show in which Los Angeles realtors show affluent buyers around expensive homes, which they may or may not buy. What about that sounds too complex to follow while scrolling through Zoopla looking for a decidedly less glamorous one-bedroom apartment in Stamford Hill? Unsurprisingly, it’s become a second-screen era mega success, ranked among the most-watched series of 2024 on Netflix.
This Takeshi’s Castle-esque Netflix game show sees contestants attempt to cross an assault course without touching the floor, which is covered in orange gunge. Is it sophisticated? No. Is it original? Also no. Is it a hit with second-screen viewers who appreciate its bonkers spirit and the total lack of brain power required to watch it? Absolutely.