With the world in shambles but new episodes of The White Lotus, Severance, Traitors, and The Bachelor keeping many from the brink each week, scientists have finally confirmed a connection: TV is so good right now because everything else is so bad.
“We’ve suspected this correlation ever since Mad Men reached its artistic height during the 2008 recession,” said Lead Researcher Dr. Sierra Fineman. “And we’ve finally proved it. When the world is bad, TV gets really fucking good.”
Other instances when this correlation occurred include MASH and The Mary Tyler Moore Show coming out during the Vietnam War, The Golden Girls coming out under the Reagan administration, and a really awesome season of The Amazing Race dropping after 9/11.
Scientists went a step further than just proving correlation, also proving that the world being so bad actually caused TV to be so damn good.
“We’ve gone to great lengths to separate correlation from causation here,” Dr. Fineman continued. “At first, we suspected that maybe good TV and a bad world just existed at the same time or that everything was bad because TV was good, but it’s the other way around. TV is good precisely because everything else is bad. The generally terrible nature of world events right now seems to have lit a fire underneath the asses of creators everywhere.”
According to scientists, the high quality of TV right now is going a long way to keep the general population’s existential angst at bay.
“If we were witnessing atrocities at a global scale like this without good TV, there’d probably be widespread riots and discontent,” Dr. Fineman continued. “But it seems like everybody is pretty distracted. This is probably bad.”
Scientists believe politicians are quite lucky that the TV landscape has shaken out as it has, considering it’s saving their asses.
As of press time, scientists were going to continue their research but got distracted by the plot twist at the end of the most recent episode of Severance, delaying their work ad infinitum.
