Cringe television refers to those comedies that bypass sentimentality altogether and go straight for the jugular by creating socially awkward situations–the equivalent of a social car crash–that are almost unbearable to watch. You squirm, gasp, cover your eyes, tell yourself you can’t believe what’s happening, and insist that you need to watch something less distressing. Yet you remain glued to the television, watching in spite of yourself. The Larry Sanders Show, the British and American versions of The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and You’re the Worst mercilessly floor the pedal, taking you to the golden nougat of cringe, that horrific center where fallen social graces, eviscerated decorum, spectacular embarrassment, and irrevocable humiliation achieve a ripeness and potency you never dreamed possible.
We watch cringe television for complex reasons. There is the perverse enjoyment of it, which almost defies psychological analysis, except to acknowledge that we harbor a streak of cruelty that enjoys watching others lose their dignity. But there is also the survivor inside us who wants to learn from these humiliating spectacles so that we won’t follow in these hapless people’s footsteps and suffer their ostracism and disgrace.
One lesson we learn from cringe television is that the more swollen our egos become, the more stupid and socially unaware we are likely to be. The more aggressively we assert our egotism in social situations, the more we alienate others, often without the slightest awareness that we’re being perceived as pompous, overbearing, bullying, obnoxious, and just plain boring.
Offering an abundance of cringe is the reality show Below Deck in all its variations. My wife and I were recently watching the Down Under version when chef Ben Robinson decided he deserved to sleep in the more spacious guest quarters for one night to catch up on his sleep. The chief stew explicitly told him not to do so because the bed had been made with clean linens for guests arriving the next day. But Ben, having an inglorious hissy fit, marched into the luxurious guest quarters, messed up the bed, and refused to leave, even after his co-worker, second officer João Franco, urged him to get out.
Ben Robinson is a talented, intelligent, well-read, articulate chef, but thanks to cringe television, those are not the qualities I will remember. I will remember a broken forty-five-year-old man selfishly violating every rule of decorum so he could indulge himself in the forbidden guest quarters. That episode taught me a painful lesson: A single moment of cringe can be so potent that it obliterates your finer qualities and reduces you to your lowest common denominator in the eyes of others. Whatever Ben does with the rest of his life, I will always see him throwing an infantile tantrum in the guest quarters, clinging to the sheets while João begs him to leave for the chief stew’s sake.
Regardless of how generous I want to be toward Ben, I cannot erase the image of him behaving like a five-year-old. This is an example of the Reverse-Halo Effect, also known as the Horn Effect, in which one conspicuous negative action contaminates our overall judgment of a person, regardless of that person’s other admirable qualities.
We all fear becoming victims of the Reverse-Halo Effect. Perhaps that’s one reason we watch cringe television: We hope to immunize ourselves against a similar fate.
Because my own ego has gotten the better of me on more occasions than I care to count, I’m sure I’ve suffered from the Reverse-Halo Effect myself. I’m therefore in no position to judge Ben Robinson. Like him, I’ve dished up more cringe than is healthy for a lifetime.
One potential source of cringe I’ve been imagining lately involves telling my co-workers that I’m retiring within a year and then changing my mind. The cat is already out of the bag. Everyone in my department knows I’m retiring. On several occasions, I’ve told colleagues that I’m hanging it up, only to have them interrupt me with, “I know. The word is out.” They’ve been treating me with the warmth and kindness people instinctively extend to someone approaching retirement. It’s a sentimental occasion, after all—the twilight of a career, a time for reflection and appreciation of the good years.
But after twenty years of watching cringe television, I found myself entertaining a perverse thought: What if I changed my mind? What if, after announcing my retirement to everyone, perhaps even enjoying a retirement party, I decided I wasn’t ready to make the leap? I needed the money. I needed the work routine. I needed human interaction. I needed to be needed. God, how awkward it would be to show up at the fall department meeting the following year when everyone thought I was gone. I could imagine being about as welcome as a bride who wakes up on her wedding day with a boil in the center of her forehead.
The good news is that I have no doubts about retiring. I will not show up like an unwanted boil next fall. I will be retired. But years of watching cringe television have instilled in me the crazed desire to imagine scenarios that would put me in socially awkward situations. This is surely a terrible use of my time. I would be better off concentrating on avoiding the very real moments of cringe that my egotism produces naturally, without distracting myself with imaginary disasters.
Ben Robinson, I’m disappointed in you for selfishly messing up those bed sheets, but I can’t judge you. I’ve metaphorically shit the bed too many times in my life to count.
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