By Oliver Parks, Staff Writer
Comfort shows. We all have them. Something old that you have watched more times than you can count, or may be just reliable, that we can fall back on and enjoy. Something to ignore the world to, something we play in the background to help us focus or feel at home, or maybe something that’s just too funny … even after the 20th re-watch.
If you’ve ever had your friends tell you to be quiet after you’ve been caught explaining the “genius” plot of “Breaking Bad” for the umpteenth time, chances are you know exactly what I mean.
For someone like me, a cold-blooded lobster who willingly secludes themselves into a cold dark cave to hunker down and do nothing, a lot of my comfort shows come from a variety of mediums. And if you relate to the very relatable and cliche description above, then maybe you’ll know what I mean when I say that one of my biggest “comfort shows” is actually YouTube.
Don’t get me wrong, I love streaming services like Hulu, HBO Max and Netflix (justice for ¨Inside Job”.) The wide arrangement of both animated and live-action TV shows that allow me to just sit back with my eyes glazed over as I drool truly are bountiful and vast to be sure, and only the questionably plausible lord above knows how many times I’ve sat through the first season of “Stranger Things,” or “Watchmen” on HBO, or just re-watching the entirety of “Futurama” and “Adventure Time” just because I could.
But there is something magical about that horrible little info dump we call YouTube, be it the endless social media-like scrolling we have access to on the discovery main page, or the plentiful bounty of backlogged gems from our youth (that make us realize how badly humor ages).
It’s like cracking open a cold can of cringey nostalgia, be it a memorable episode from “Cheers” or Markiplier playing through “Firewatch,” “Resident Evil 7” or “Donut County.” And although it may make our skin boil as we internally question: What are we doing? Wasting away our precious seconds of life just sitting alone re-watching the same hour-long video of a video game we’ll never play, or the season finale for a show where, by now, most of the actors have magically turned into living prunes … that aside, I still find it’s an enjoyable dose of serotonin, at least for me.
Comfort is a word that varies widely from person to person. Its exact definition can be drastic in difference depending on who’s asked, and it’s often that people can’t give a straightforward answer when the question arises. But, most people can agree that the formulaic head pats prescribed in modern television work well in making the audience happy. I’m sure most of us remember the high rise of excitement that came last year with the newest season of “Better Call Saul.” There is definitely a method to the madness, and TV studios have the method transcribed into marble.
To be able to sit back and relax as beautiful stories are fed to you, as if your screen is a tenderly loving mother that your wee baby eyes require sustenance from, is simply wonderful. Be it the dark and unspeakable places of the internet’s entertainment industries, the ones we promised to never tell our close friends or family about, or the numbing watch cycle headaches we like to call our childhood memories, or the mass-produced one-hit wonders that seem to be flowing from “Big Television” like they’re trying to drown us, comfort is derived from the simple feeling of belonging.
To belong to the pictures, to belong to a group of quirky individuals you have watched learn and grow, to belong to the team who stops the end of the world and defeats the ultimate evil. It’s as if you have front-row seats to the adventure, the drama, the horror. You are experiencing the story with the characters first hand, and to be able to jump start that feeling at the click of a button? That, my fellow binge-watching lobsters, that is what I call comfort.
Senior Oliver Parks can be reached at 23parksol67@daretolearn.org.