Looking for Magic

boredom, TV, & the search for interest

Sigh – boredom is hard. Television is easy. Not ‘bored’ in the way of having nothing to do—far from it—but in the way of feeling devoid of interest, of that excitement so strong you forget time and schedule and should I make a snack right now, or just skip to the afternoon beer. In the absence of interest, life becomes a struggle. We try sticking to our routines, keeping lists of the things that we love, doing what’s best for ourselves and what’s healthy; but there will always be the sense that we are waiting for something to come along and point us in a single direction.

A good show sometimes seems like the one offering of modern life capable of achieving this level of distraction. It can remind us that our culture is still capable of bringing us something new, of bringing us together for a moment in time. When we find it, the world suddenly feels tangible and whole, making something like sense, and you know without thinking about it that the next several weeks of your life will be devoted to this show, no matter how little it seems to give you in return.

Yet this is also a fantasy. The perfect show doesn’t exist, the good ones are never waiting for you in plain sight, and the recipe for what’s ‘interesting’ isn’t one that anybody else can tell you.

Amidst a particularly trying winter, I finally started watching Twin Peaks—because David Lynch had died, his very essence swirling in the air, and because so many of my friends spoke of this show as an absolute beacon of interest. I wouldn’t have to try, one co-worker told me; it would just happen. This sounded a bit too much like a dream; if I have ever tried to say what will ‘just happen’, I have been hilariously wrong. And perhaps that’s exactly why things happen—because no one expected them to. They happened because the way was clear.

The way between me and Twin Peaks wasn’t clear; not yet. I respected the effort, of course, its objectively massive swing. I had tried with Lynch before, with both Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and I had begun to suspect that the two of us were failing to see eye-to-eye. (A comforting thought, for how it implies that we might find a way to do so in the future.) It was clear at that point that I was not merely looking for ‘something to watch’, which Twin Peaks certainly is; I was, rather frustratingly, looking for magic—for the show that would drag me head-first into its fold.

A different friend recommended Gossip Girl. I was getting desperate, and while it sounded something like a joke, I knew that this particular friend’s passion was 100% serious. Something about their sense of compulsive affection, for something so off the beaten track of what was trending in 2025, inspired me to give it a try. I was five episodes deep into Twin Peaks when I switched over to Gossip Girl with the idea that I was only taking a break. Twenty-four hours later I had officially dropped Twin Peaks to the floor (picturing myself putting it aside for some future version of myself to find) and had instead surrounded myself completely with over-dramatised lives of filthy rich high schoolers in New York City.

That is not to say anything bad about Twin Peaks—or anything particularly positive, for that matter, about Gossip Girl. The heart wants what it wants, and some part of me resented the over-hyped and pretentious air that had seeped into the former, and found some unexpected delight in the apparently unassuming air of the latter. My twelve year-old self, who experienced 2007 first hand, might have had something different to say about the matter; but that was a part of the charm, to re-create my impressions and to experience some of what I had missed.

I quickly moved on, however, leaving behind Blair and Serena et al before the end of the first season. You don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it; you go forward with nothing but the memory that you have experienced magic before, the desire to do so again. We take recommendations, click on the tiles that appear interesting. We watch for an hour or two and try not to be disappointed when, inevitably, it doesn’t click.

Eventually I stumbled into The Pitt, currently airing on HBO*. Another show that, if you were looking at a list of my favorites, would probably not appear as an obvious choice: it’s a chaotic medical drama, taking DNA from ER and putting it into a format similar to 24, as a single day transpires in the Pittsburgh Something Something Medical Center over the course of a single season. I have no particular love for medical procedurals, but can easily see the appeal: a fairly average American profession featuring individuals from all walks of life, in a close-quarters work environment, engaged in steady and intense action.

The Pitt takes this abundance of opportunity and packs it more tightly and efficiently into its single hour of television than any show I’ve seen, maybe, ever—at least in a way that also feels careful, conscious, and mindful of its characters and their stories. It channels all the brunt, tragedy, and rapidity of life in 2025. I burned through all five episodes that were available at the time, and was actually disappointed to find that I wouldn’t have the experience of excitedly charging through the remainder of the season.

Nothing’s perfect, I suppose; there’s always something hanging, the loosened thread. We move on, necessarily, to fill the void. As I waited through the long weeks in between new episodes of The Pitt, I landed upon an old favorite buried in the dregs of HBO’s algorithm: Station Eleven, which is not a very old show, but one that I loved with some intensity a few years back.

It’s hard to describe when it’s the right time to re-experience something, whether a show or movie or book. You know it when it happens. It seemed a bit antithetical to my search for magic that I should fall back on something I already knew, in lieu of something new; but it only took about five minutes of the first episode of Station Eleven to remind me that magic is weird and fleeting and, sometimes, can be found waiting for you in your back pocket, precisely because it’s where you’ve checked a thousand times before.

…

*I have resisted the urge throughout this post to repeatedly describe how and where I managed to find and watch each one of these shows, out of the conviction that doing so would result in too many tangents about streaming availability and ultimately some pretty boring copy. There is something to be said about the absurdity of flipping between so many different apps, how disjointed and weird it is to be a TV-watcher in this era and how this ultimately does affect the experience of watching these shows; but I deemed this to be a whole ‘nother can of worms meriting its own discussion. In a poem, perhaps: the perspective of the viewer flashing between different screens, searching frantically for that one bit of media that will result in them being, finally, entertained. (Maybe a bit too much DFW; I’ll get back to you on this.)

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