The Four Lights and the Infinite Scroll
Living in rural Ontario in the eighties, television was not just a service; it was a delicate negotiation with the atmosphere. Before the days of fiber optics and seamless streaming, our entertainment was entirely at the mercy of the elements. I can still vividly recall the specific ritual of it, that heavy and tactile click of the dial as you cycled through the handful of available options. On a clear night, you had your reliable anchors: the steady CBC on Channels 3 and 5, Global on 6, and the CTV duo of 9 and 13. We had the local grit of CHCH on 11 and the quiet, educational presence of TVO on 19.
But if the stars aligned, the antenna was pointed just right, and the wind stayed calm, we might catch a glimpse of the city magic from Fox on Channel 29 or the neon energy of CityTV on 57. It was a fragile victory. Inclement weather often meant your viewing options were cut in half, leaving you with nothing but static where a sitcom used to be.
There was a certain charm to that limitation. Because our choices were narrowed down to a precious few, watching television was a communal experience in a way that is hard to find today. If a major event happened on a popular show on a Sunday night, or if everyone tuned in to watch the latest travels of The Littlest Hobo, you knew that every kid at school the next morning had seen the exact same thing. We were all on the same timeline, living through the same stories at the exact same moment. Then the programmable VCR arrived, and it felt like we had finally hacked the system. We were no longer beholden to the TV guide because we were finally the masters of our own scheduling, provided we were careful not to accidentally record over a classic hockey game.
Fast forward to 2026, and that negotiation with the atmosphere has been replaced by a negotiation with my credit card statement. For a brief, shining moment in the early 2010s, we thought we had won. We were cutting the cord and finally stopping the practice of paying for two hundred channels of junk just to get the three we actually wanted. When you break a monolithic system into smaller parts, the complexity and the cost tend to migrate rather than disappear.
Today, we live in the era of the fragmented buffet. To get even a fraction of the variety we had on the old dial, that one monthly price has splintered into a dozen different digital tolls. Between a premium Netflix subscription at twenty-five dollars, Crave with HBO at twenty-two, Disney at seventeen, and Apple at thirteen, the math adds up quickly. Even Amazon Prime, which used to be a simple perk, now asks for an extra three dollars just to dodge the commercials they recently added back into the mix. By the time you add in high-speed internet, which is the invisible utility making the whole thing possible, that monthly entertainment tax is easily double what cable used to cost (even after you factor for inflation). It begs the question, are we really getting more value?
The real cost, however, is not financial. It is temporal. I have lost count of how many nights I have sat down, remote in hand, only to fall into the scroll vortex. I will spend twenty minutes of a quiet evening cycling through trailers and weighing the match percentage of a dozen different shows. By the time I have navigated the menus of three different apps, the desire to actually watch something has evaporated. Search fatigue is a real thing. I end up turning the TV off, having watched nothing but a montage of advertisements and interface animations. In the eighties, we had physical static on the screen. Today, we have mental static in our decision-making.
This brings up a question about what we are actually buying for all that money. The production value of modern television is staggering, with single episodes of fantasy series costing north of twenty million dollars. The dragons look real and the battles are cinematic, but I often find myself thinking back to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Growing up, that show was a staple. By today’s standards, the sets can look a bit like carpeted office buildings, yet the stories were profound. Because they did not have the budget to blow up a planet every week, they had to rely on philosophy and character. An entire episode might take place in a single room, centered around a debate on what it means to be sentient or how many lights there are in a room.
Today, we have all the CGI in the world, but it sometimes feels like a crutch used to fill a narrative void. We have transitioned from the era of the bottle episode, where constraints forced creativity, to an era where anything is possible yet everything can feel a bit hollow. There is an undeniable thrill in seeing an epic fantasy world brought to life with high-fidelity detail, especially as someone who loves that genre, but I often wonder if we have traded depth for surface-level shine.
Ultimately, we are paying significantly more for the privilege of choice. In the eighties, we were limited by what a handful of broadcasters decided was worth our time. Today, we are only limited by our bandwidth and our patience. While the search for something to watch can feel like a chore, there is something genuinely remarkable about living in a time where a high-fidelity adaptation of a massive book series is just a click away.
Perhaps the real lesson from those nights in rural Ontario isn’t about the number of channels. It is about the intent we bring to the screen. Back then, television was an appointment rather than background noise. Today, in the middle of our infinite digital buffet, the most valuable thing is still the quiet hour at the end of a long day, sitting on the couch and sharing a story with the people we care about. No matter how many millions of dollars are spent on the production, that connection remains the only thing that hasn’t gone up in price. It is the one part of the entertainment ecosystem that will never need an upgrade.
