Trash TV, Trashy Novels, and the Totally Unhinged Science of Loving What You Love

Let's set the scene. It's 11:47 p.m. on a Tuesday. You've got a half-eaten bowl of cereal balanced on your knee, your phone is face-down so no one can accidentally FaceTime you in this state, and you are deeply, spiritually invested in whether Brittany from Season 4 of some mid-budget dating show is about to make the worst decision of her televised life.

You know what that is? That's self-care, baby.

Not the kind that comes in a jade roller or a $14 adaptogen latte — the real kind. The kind that requires zero explanation and zero apology. The kind that Gen Z and millennials are finally, loudly, and beautifully refusing to be embarrassed about anymore.

The Guilt in "Guilty Pleasure" Was Always a Lie

Somewhere along the way, we absorbed this idea that the entertainment we actually enjoy needed to be justified against some invisible rubric of cultural seriousness. You could watch prestige drama about morally ambiguous antiheroes without anyone raising an eyebrow, but admit you've re-read the same cozy mystery series fourteen times and suddenly you owe everyone an explanation.

Here's the thing: that rubric was never neutral. It was built on a whole stack of classist, gendered, and frankly boring assumptions about what counts as "worthwhile" media. Reality TV? Mostly women watch it. Romance novels? Ditto. Low-budget horror with questionable CGI? Written off as schlocky before the first jump scare even lands.

The reframe happening right now — especially among younger audiences — is simply this: if something makes you feel regulated, rested, and genuinely good, that is the whole point of entertainment. You don't need a dissertation to back it up.

Your Brain on Comfort Content (It's Doing Great, Actually)

There's legitimate psychological reasoning behind why familiar, low-stakes, or predictably dramatic media works so well as a wind-down tool. Psychologists have been poking at the concept of "narrative transportation" for years — the idea that getting absorbed in a story, even a deeply silly one, gives your brain a genuine break from the exhausting work of being a person with problems.

Comfort media, specifically, often works because of its predictability. You know the couple is going to get together. You know the villain is going to get their comeuppance. You know that somewhere in this 400-page paperback with an embossed cover, someone is going to describe a brooding man's jawline in a way that is objectively unhinged and you are going to love it.

That predictability isn't a flaw. It's the feature. In a world that is chaotic, exhausting, and frequently bewildering, knowing how something ends is an underrated luxury.

The Loud-and-Proud Era of Owning Your Weird Taste

Something genuinely shifted in the cultural conversation around the early 2020s. Maybe it was the pandemic forcing everyone to stop pretending they were spending their evenings doing enriching things. Maybe it was BookTok turning romance readers into a fanbase so large and vocal that publishers had to actually pay attention. Maybe it was the collective realization that life is short and Real Housewives reunion episodes are long and that's just how it is.

Whatever sparked it, people started talking about their comfort media the way they used to talk about prestige picks — with specificity, enthusiasm, and zero hedging. "I don't really watch much TV, but when I do—" became "I am currently on my fourth rewatch of a show that has been off the air since 2009 and I will not be taking questions."

This is not lowering standards. This is setting them. Knowing exactly what you need to decompress, and actually giving yourself permission to have it, is a form of emotional intelligence that a lot of people spend years trying to develop.

The Boundary-Setting You Didn't Know You Were Doing

Here's an angle that doesn't get enough credit: choosing comfort media is often an act of boundary-setting with yourself.

When you put on something cozy and familiar instead of the thing you feel like you should be watching, you're making a call about your own capacity. You're saying: I know what I need right now, and it's not a three-hour documentary about geopolitical collapse. It's the one where the bakers cry about their pastries.

That kind of self-knowledge — recognizing your emotional bandwidth and honoring it — is genuinely hard to develop. People pay therapists to help them get there. And yet somehow, picking the comfort rerun over the prestige stress-watch still gets treated like a moral failing.

It's not. It's actually pretty wise.

How to Stop Apologizing Mid-Sentence

If you're still in the habit of pre-emptively defending your taste before anyone even asks — "I know it's dumb, but I love—" — here's your invitation to drop the disclaimer.

You don't owe anyone a justification for what helps you feel like a functional human. Not your coworkers, not your very culturally serious college friend, not the part of your brain that still thinks you should be watching something with subtitles.

Owning your comfort media isn't about being contrarian or performing some kind of ironic appreciation. It's about being honest about what actually works for you, and then — here's the radical part — just doing that thing without the twelve-step apology tour.

The weirdest, most specific, most objectively ridiculous thing you watch or read or listen to when you need to recharge? That's not your shameful secret. That's your data. It's you knowing yourself well enough to know what you need.

The Sasa Panda Verdict

Comfort media is not the enemy of good taste. It is good taste — taste that's been calibrated to your actual nervous system instead of some external scoreboard nobody agreed to.

So go ahead. Reread the book. Rewatch the show. Buy the sequel to the movie that got a 22% on Rotten Tomatoes. Do it without the running commentary in your head about what it says about you as a person.

It says you know what you like. Honestly? That's kind of everything.