Between 2002 and 2010, my wife and I lived in the golden age of unfiltered, algorithm-free television consumption—a fleeting, pre-social media era when discovery felt organic, unmanipulated by streaming services shoving their “curated” picks down our throats. We had no children yet, which meant our evenings weren’t dictated by bedtime battles or the soul-crushing exhaustion of parenting twins. Instead, we devoured TV with the kind of single-minded intensity usually reserved for law students cramming for the bar. This was our time, our indulgence, our untamed expedition into the wilderness of prestige television.
The years between 2002 and 2010 had a peculiar aftertaste, like the lingering fizz of a decade that refused to fully dissolve. The glow of ’90s perpetual adolescence still clung to the air, a warm haze of dial-up nostalgia and post-ironic optimism. Blogs, those digital soapboxes for the unpublished and the deluded, sprouted like toadstools after a storm, each one feeding the fantasy that we were just one viral post away from literary immortality.
Social media existed, but it had yet to metastasize into the roiling cesspool of disinformation and rage farming it would become. Back then, the Internet still wore the mask of a utopian dream—an egalitarian promised land where access to knowledge would liberate us all. The idea that democracy could be strengthened through connectivity wasn’t yet the punchline to a cruel joke.
And then there was television, freshly anointed with the label of “prestige,” its best offerings treated like high art. To binge a drama wasn’t an act of sloth but a cultural event, akin to devouring a novel in a single fevered sitting. It was the golden age of TV, before algorithms herded us like cattle into the content farms of endless, joyless streaming. We watched with reverence, believing that television had finally transcended its popcorn past and entered the realm of literature. Little did we know, the binge model we worshipped would soon turn us all into passive, glassy-eyed gluttons, gorging on content as if it might fill the growing void.
Back then, finding a new show felt like a voyage of discovery, an expedition guided not by an algorithm but by word-of-mouth and gut instinct. Watching TV was like perusing a farmer’s market, sampling the produce ourselves, choosing what looked freshest, most intriguing, most promising—rather than having some all-knowing digital overlord shove a preselected “Because You Watched” playlist in our faces. My wife and I felt like Magellan charting unknown waters, sailing into TV’s vast, uncharted depths, unsure if we would encounter sea monsters, mermaids, or islands teeming with enchantment. It was thrilling. It was dangerous. And most importantly, it was ours.
Of all the shows we binged, three stood out as cultural gold mines we felt like we alone had unearthed: Six Feet Under, The Wire, and Lost. Each had its own gravitational pull. Six Feet Under wasn’t just about a dysfunctional funeral home—it was about risks of individual freedom in a family that disregarded societal conventions. The Wire was a sprawling, devastating essay on the fight for dignity in a rigged system. And Lost? It was Gilligan’s Island meets Sartrean nihilism, a fever dream of redemption and existential dread where the only certainty was uncertainty itself.
Then came 2010—and with it, the seismic shift of having twins. Overnight, TV ceased to be a grand expedition and became a survival mechanism, a warm bath to sink into after the daily combat of child-rearing. Gone was the immersive, existential drama-watching experience. Now, TV became a battlefield medic, stitching us back together, offering temporary relief before the next round of exhaustion. We weren’t discovering new worlds anymore. We were licking our wounds, bracing for tomorrow.
Cinemorphosis 