Finding Comfort in TV That No One Else Is Talking About

In the last year, especially its second half, as the world continued to get more and more entangled in many ways of its own making, popular culture morphed into a more fraught version of itself. Life online, or in reality for that matter, became a distinct afterthought, a mirror image of what it once used to be or mean or stand for. With rising recession, job losses and steadily depleting quality of life on the planet, the surroundings were bleaker than before.

For me personally, platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram had been forms of light entertainment, something to keep me going. But with Musk’s occupation, and then Trump getting elected to power, the genuine, steep and fast enshittification of X happened so fast we couldn’t even put a timeline to it.

Soon, these platforms became a diary of some of the worst thoughts we had as people; bots and algorithms fought it out. Our vexed, most sincerely pessimistic hot takes, and a fact-less world of lies began to formulate itself on these platforms. In this newfangled quagmire I, too, was beginning to lose my bearings when I decided to cut off and look elsewhere for reprieve.

And just like the good ol’ days, classic television came to my rescue.

Through these months I had been keeping up with all the recent TV shows. Watching Bad Sisters was oddly cathartic, Slow Horses felt unreal and yet deeply romantic, Industry felt vaguely familiar and also like a much deserved and long-overdue coup of the otherwise highly glamorized finance industry. Shows that had been on all those wrap up 2024 lists had already been watched, their reviews read and their memes, reactions tweeted out. And now I was tired. I wanted out. I wanted in.

I wanted to go back to the halcyon days when TV meant just some refreshing, light entertainment that could be watched as a corollary to the rest of life, not despite it. Watching TV shows on my laptop since college days has been a favourite way for me to bookend my otherwise boring, tiring days. But with the television of 2024 being so futuristic, dystopic, and overall hectic I was sapped. And in this bone-tired fugue I ran into the still relatively fresh HBO series Insecure. It had been on my to-watch list for years and now was the time!

Turns out Issa Rae’s Issa was just who I wanted to be. Not the single, unemployed and driving around LA in her Chevrolet bit, but the fact that she had a real, flesh and bones best friend (Yvonne Orji’s scintillating Molly) in whom she could confide in all her life’s woes. A friend with whom she not only shared the bad of life but also partook the goodness with. Their bottomless drinking reveries. Their days spent indoors cooking, gossiping about friends or just talking each others’ ears off about careers, parents, cousins. Their “Self-care Sundays” gave me a new way to look at my own weekends. Issa’s hunt for a meaningful job, making me think about how I was in a similar workspace that I loved so much.

Amid the obvious plot of female friendship between people of color, the show also subtly showed the everyday struggles of people my age. The amorphous shapes of some friendships, how deep bonds of love sometimes are reduced to nameless nothings, straddling the complexities of wanting to be a careerist while also navigating a million personal, daily battles—Rae had woven it all into the show. Insecure made me evaluate myself, my career and how I, too, had some meaningful friendships in my early thirties, after all.

The various ways the show tackled mental health on TV made me look back at the times when I was constantly poorly paid, going through the cycles of bad relationships, worse apartments and even worse flatmates, and being pit against other women at my workplace. In watching, crying and laughing with Issa and Molly and Kelly and Tiffany, it felt like I was looking back with pride at a former, younger self and giving five-years-ago Anandi a warm, tight hug for surviving the maze that her life was then.

Insecure was not the only “old” show I watched to cope with the relentlessness of 2024. Towards the end of the year, after dithering around indecisively for years, I finally started to watch Seinfeld. Though I don’t remember watching the show ever before, as I started, parts of it felt familiar. The jokes reminded me of similar ones on Friends, or the fact that we’re all really a bunch of neurotic human beings who need to watch similar people on screen to feel better. Jerry, Elaine, George, Kramer are needy, cribbing, petty and gregarious, just like the rest of us. My 2025 worries were instantly annihilated while listening to George’s various litanies about not having a girlfriend and then about having one and not knowing how to get rid of her.

Have I seen these shows before? Why do they feel so nostalgic, relatable and familiar? My mind plays tricks with me as I find myself pulled into the seemingly funny, approachable and endlessly innocent worlds (and times) of these characters. Watching them in a new timescape altogether, when the world around me was mired in various exigencies that barely find a mention in them, made me feel strangely at peace.

Their datedness made for a pleasantly discombobulating experience, as if I had assigned myself to a kind of deliberate anonymity away from the forever buzzing, noisy world of the present day. In an era where everyone’s either watching their recent TV series on their choice of platform, or are rewatching Friends or The Office, I felt like I had bested the algorithm. I was, in fact, watching a show that was old in nature but new to me and the thinker in me wouldn’t let that chance slip by without mining it for some meaning. It helped me realize that no matter what the story we want to narrativize, there’s merit in that action, because sooner or later it will be covered in a patina of dust and someone 25 years later might draw it out of the dusty visages of some streaming platform, to watch it as a way to cut out the noise around.

One of my early favorite episodes on Seinfeld was “The Parking Garage” (Season 3, episode 6). It defines a classic Seinfeld episode and much like a lot of TV it wouldn’t find any meaning or base in the modern day with the omnipresence of gadgets, apps, notifications that ensure that no one or no thing ever gets lost (ever!!!). Elaine, Kramer, George and Jerry amble aimlessly through various levels of a parking lot, looking for their car, the helpless leading the clueless. I watched this episode with rapt attention, not once reaching out for my phone or switching tabs or pausing the show. The episode is a masterclass in showing an immensely commonplace life situation at the time that is at once so deeply personal, it becomes immediately relatable to the larger audience. One thing leads to another and George and Jerry try and fail laughably at public urination. Kramer’s physical theatrics work like an anodyne for my chronically online brain.

For its various envelope pushing episodes and stances, over the next few seasons it became clear to me that Seinfeld really was a show about the mutability of everyday life. That things are the way they are and one needn’t really try to picture them with a poetic eye or look out with a magnifying lens to parse for meaning—there is meaning in the everyday nothingness of it all. Just as the famous George Costanza quote goes: “A show about nothing.” And I was quick to adapt it to the seeming everydayness of my life too. Especially now that I was offline and mostly just venturing online to read or watch Seinfeld. Simmering underneath the maddening cacophony of the internet lies nothing, if there’s meaning to be parsed it is outside of the internet.

While watching Insecure and then Seinfeld, I felt a kind of ease, shelter and relaxation. My mind was at a total, new form of quietness. This was a language I knew, far from the dissonant noises of the present. They became my way of taking a privileged break from the incessant onslaught of the world falling into pieces in so many ways. The characters on both these shows have an air of loneliness, as though standing on the other side of a window, a life, a sea, trying to peer in.

Watching others, and contextualizing their own lives in the larger schema is the way they make sense of it all. Unfettered by the noise of intangible nothings like social media trends, micro- and sub-cultures, incessant and arbitrary algorithm induced anxieties, these characters lent me a way to escape the present and wayfare through their mundane, old-timey quandaries.

Around the same time, I was reading older books, Virginia Woolf, Chris Kraus, Proust. And it felt like being transported to a different time, at least while I was glued to the page. But there was a difference between the two forms of escape—each time I stepped out, I invariably searched for the corner Restaurant from Seinfeld in the street outside my house. Visuals from the show had imprinted themselves firmly on to my mind’s eye, I searched for Newman in my neighborhood cafe, and smiled to myself at the sight of the familiar tall, curly haired barista.

Woolf’s characters didn’t jump out at me with that vehemence. This made me realize how the visual memory tends to supersede the print one. But once pulled into and away into the cocoon of these older television shows, I felt a lithe, interstitial fugue of instant engagement. Perhaps that’s what I needed at that moment. During those hours I became my former conscientious self, listening to the dialogues so attentively, my mind occupied almost in a reckless fury.

Now I’m midway through Seinfeld and the thought of what next keeps nagging me from time to time. I smile to myself, and try to not think much about it. Whatever I might watch next, it will at least not be dictated by any demonic algorithm (or so I believe).