I've been thinking a lot about habits — mine, and everyone else's.
One of the things that made broadcast television work when I was growing up was the power of habit. My first memory of negotiating my bedtime with my parents was that once a week, they would let me stay up until 8:30 PM instead of going to bed at 8:00, and I could decide which night to do it. I used my precious extra half-hour once a week on Tuesdays, to stay up to watch Happy Days. Back then, you couldn’t stream Happy Days later, and you couldn't record it at home. You watched it or you missed it, and that inflexibility built habits, and those habits helped build audiences, and those audiences could be very faithful.
This brings me to coffee. I struggle with a lot of routines I try to develop, but I am quite faithful to my morning coffee. I've had drip coffee machines large and small, I've had pour-over rigs, and I've had pod gizmos that removed the most obnoxious part of making coffee, which is dealing with coffee grounds. But recently, I've settled on a blue stainless-steel French press (I don't want to handle glass before 8:00 AM).
Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, and Kieran Culkin in Succession/HBO MAX
So the morning goes like this: Come downstairs. Put the water in the kettle, press the button to heat it. While it's heating, let the dog out. Grind the coffee. Put the coffee in the French press. When the water is hot, pour it into the press. It has to brew for four minutes. Set my watch with a four-minute timer. During those four minutes, I get my meds, and I set up the dog's meds on his spoon — mine go down with water, the dog's go down with bacon-flavored (and dog-specific) spray cheese. Usually, I have time to empty the dishwasher. Then I bring in and feed and give "cheese spoon" to the dog, and usually by then, the coffee is ready. I get two cups out of the press, which I often enjoy while watching YouTube, and then it's time to start the rest of the day.
And then a few weeks ago, I found that through some terrible neglect of my own basic needs, I had run out of coffee beans. I felt my eyes widen like I was a cartoon character. People think it's the caffeine, but really it's the routine. I had disrupted one of the few constants I had been good about maintaining. What to do? And then I remembered that in my pantry, I had a jar of instant Café Bustelo. Nothing seemed more different from my fussy morning plan than instant coffee, but hey -- you make do.
So I did something different, and the Café Bustelo mornings went like this: Boil water, add coffee. Intriguingly simple during a stressful time! And honestly, still coffee, still totally fine, tastes solid, still got the morning off to the correct start. There was only one problem: all the other pieces. When to give the dog his pills! When to empty the dishwasher! What order was anything supposed to go in? I stuck with the instant coffee until it was gone, just because it was so easy, and by then, I had to train myself to do the other thing all over again.
It made me think about the fragility of viewing and listening habits. There's a reason HBO has tried so hard to maintain Sunday nights as its home. You can't really build a Succession habit, for instance, because it's not on enough of the time. But you can build an HBO Sunday habit. Podcasts and radio work this way, too, where it's challenging to build and benefit from habits in an increasingly choose-your-own-adventure entertainment and culture climate. Want to watch Happy Days? Watch it with breakfast! Or watch it on Saturday! Or save it all and watch it at the end of the season! It's chaos, my friends, it's chaos.
Don't get me wrong; this can be a very good thing. I am not nostalgic for the limited options of my youth. I already told you I top off this routine-bound morning watching people listing the 20 Greatest Movie Twists on YouTube or whatever; you can bet your sweet bazoo I didn't have access to that as a 12-year-old.
It's just a different arrangement of attention. If your routine was to sit with your partner or your parent at the same time, get the same snack, get under the same blanket, watch the same show, and have the same conversations, then it's nice to have the flexibility of doing it any time you want. It's easier; it's the instant coffee of TV. But just like you have to figure out when to give the dog the cheese spoon if not while the French press is brewing, you have to figure out how to keep the person, the blanket, the snack, and the conversations if you're not being pressed into the habit.
It's not easy. As I write this, I think the dog needs his pill.
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