idiot box — 1 explainer, sort of

idiot box is what my mother called every television she ever bought, and she bought four. ignorance, she said on a sunday call, is cheaper than therapy and arrives faster, so i wrote that down while the kitchen lights buzzed and the line went on without me.

writing this from a desk that is not in my kitchen, in a building that has a third floor i try to avoid. carla is up there in the operations review, the one with bagels nobody is allowed to touch until the slides are done. i have, give or take, the rest of the morning.

my mom phoned around ten. i picked up because i always pick up. she said the word twice in two minutes and never once with a wink. that is, it turns out, the post.

parked at the desk. carla took the stairs, which means she’ll be back faster than the elevator route. notes can wait. the post can’t.

idiot box, the term that survived networks

let’s be clear about what an idiot in the strictly classical sense means here, because the term idiot box doesn’t survive 70 years of broadcasting by accident. the box outlived the dial. the box outlived the antenna. the box outlived the channel guide that came in the sunday paper and the tv guide that came in the mail and the digital programming menu that arrived with cable. the box even outlived the literal box — the thing on my kitchen counter is a flat panel, depth approximately one and a half inches, and we still call it the box. because the word was never about the shape. the word was always about the verb.

the verb is: you sit, and you watch, and the box does the rest. the box decides the order. the box decides the pace. the box decides when there’s a commercial about car insurance and when there’s not. you, the watcher, contribute almost nothing. you contribute, at most, a remote, and even the remote, in 2026, is mostly buttons you don’t press.

that’s why idiot box stuck. not because the watcher is dumb in the sense people mean when they’re being mean. because the watcher is an idiot in the original greek sense — a private person, uninvolved, sitting at home. the box helps you stay home. the box is, in this sense, an instrument of the original greek meaning of idiot. they should have given the box an honorary degree.

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a magazine my dentist subscribes to, about why the term outlasted “the tube” and “the boob tube” and “the picture box” and every other folksy synonym. my theory: idiot survived because idiot is the word that was always the most accurate. the box does not flatter you. neither does the word.

who called it that first, allegedly

i looked this up. i had eleven tabs open, which is a quiet morning by my standards, and one of them was an etymology page that i’m not going to name because the rule is i do not cite the manual. the manual says, more or less, that the term idiot box shows up in english in the late 1950s, and gains traction through the 1960s, when television becomes the appliance the family argues about whether to buy.

some of the early uses are american. some are british. the british, who already had the goggle box and the telly, took to idiot box with the kind of enthusiasm a culture reserves for an insult that confirms what it already suspected. the americans, who had bigger sets and more channels, used the term with affection. they were, on average, watching more of it.

by the 1970s, the term is a cliché. by the 1980s, it’s the kind of joke a sitcom puts in its own opening sequence to demonstrate self-awareness. by the 1990s, it’s printed on a t-shirt at a mall kiosk. by the 2000s, it’s quaint. by 2026, it’s me, standing at my kitchen counter with a microwave that is the seventh i have killed and a flat panel showing me a man explaining inflation, and my mother, on the phone, calling it the idiot box with no air quotes.

she earned the right to use it sincere. she watched four of them die. she paid for three. the fourth was a wedding present from someone we no longer speak to.

mom called sunday and used it without irony

mom called sunday. mom always calls sunday. it is the appointment in my week i did not schedule and cannot move. she opened with the weather, transitioned to her neighbor’s hedge, and landed on the topic she actually wanted to discuss, which was that the news, last night, told her something about interest rates that she did not entirely understand and would prefer i did not explain.

“i had the idiot box on,” she said. “and the man said something about a number.”

i waited. i have learned to wait when mom is approaching her point. the point arrives, on a delay, like a package she ordered three weeks ago and forgot about. the point, this time, was that she did not want to know more than the man on the screen had told her, because if she knew more, she would have to act on it, and acting on a number you heard at 7:45pm on a sunday is, in her view, the beginning of a kind of trouble she has spent her whole life carefully avoiding.

this is, i would argue, wisdom. mom does not call it wisdom. mom calls it not making things harder for myself, which is, frankly, a better translation.

the kitchen where i watch news i won’t act on

i have, in my own kitchen, the same arrangement. small flat panel on the counter, between the kettle and the bread bin. it is on while i make coffee. it is on while i eat cereal — which, for the record and per a hot take i have defended elsewhere, is soup with rules. it is on while i stand there waiting for the microwave (the seventh, which is, so far, behaving), to finish reheating something i will not enjoy.

the box, in my kitchen, plays mostly news. the news, in my kitchen, plays mostly to no one. i am, technically, in the room. i am, technically, listening. but i am not, in the sense the news anchors mean, watching. i am letting the box do its job. the box’s job is to be a low buzz of human voice while i go about the small business of being awake. the box does this very well.

i am told, by people who care about these things, that this is not a good way to live. i am told that the news should be engaged with. that opinions should be formed. that letters should be written. that votes should be cast on every available issue, including the ones nobody asked me to vote on. those people are correct, in the abstract. in the specific, they are exhausting. i prefer the box.

ignorance as a form of financial therapy, briefly

here is where i have to bring in a hot take from the bank. i’m doing it because mom did it first, on the phone, in front of god and her landline, when she said that ignorance, in this case, was financial therapy. she did not phrase it that way. she phrased it her way. mine is a translation for the post.

the take is on file: ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. it is a take i have repeated to myself, in my kitchen, in front of the box, at 8:14am while the man on the screen explains a graph that goes up and to the right in a way i will not be able to summarize ten minutes from now and that will, regardless, change nothing about my day.

i am not saying you should be ignorant. i am saying: there is a budget for how many things one human can carry. mom’s budget includes the hedge, the neighbor with the hedge, four grandchildren that aren’t mine, the church bulletin, the casserole rotation, and the small portion of the news she lets the box deliver. that is, by my reckoning, a full life. adding interest rate analysis to it would not make her happier. it would, in fact, make her slower at the casserole.

i am the same. i have a job. i have a dishwasher i don’t run. i have the third yoga mat under the sofa from 2023, possibly evolving. i have a phone at 23 percent and a microwave that survived the week. these are my line items. the news, played softly, while i butter toast, is the appropriate dosage. the rest is theatre.

why the box is the better honest object

now i would like to say something nice about the box itself. i would like to argue that the box is, of all the screens in my apartment, the most honest one.

the laptop pretends to be productive. the laptop is, mostly, where i open eleven tabs and do not close any of them. the phone pretends to be social. the phone is, mostly, where i scroll past pictures of people i went to school with and their renovated kitchens. the work computer pretends to be where i earn my paycheck. the work computer is where i write posts about the box.

the box, alone, makes no claim to virtue. the box does not pretend to be anything other than what it is, which is a piece of furniture that talks. you do not feel guilty for watching the box the way you feel guilty for scrolling the phone, because the box has the decency to acknowledge that it is wasting your time. the phone, by contrast, insists that the time you are giving it is somehow being repaid. the phone is lying. the box is not.

this is, i think, why mom calls it the idiot box without flinching. she is not insulting the box or herself. she is naming the relationship accurately. she is sitting on her sofa in the room with the floral wallpaper, and the box is talking, and she is allowing it to. the contract is clear. the contract is honest. the contract is, frankly, the only honest contract in her household, because the dishwasher is also a cabinet that judges, and the fridge has been making a sound she does not want to investigate, and the answering machine still has a message from 2014 that nobody has summoned the courage to delete.

watching mom watch the box, on the rare occasion i visit, is like watching someone do something that other people would call dumb and that, examined honestly, is just dumb in the older sense — calm, silent participation in a domestic ritual. she is not stupid. she is choosing, on a tuesday at 7:45pm, to let the box do the work. that’s not a failure. that’s a system. she’s been running it for forty years.

the box, properly used, is a companion. i would go further, but i would lose people. so i will stop at companion, and then add, in a quieter voice, that the box is also, on the right night, with the right show, the closest thing to a member of the household some of us have. that’s not sad. that’s the contract. that’s also the rerun of a sitcom i’m not going to name in this paragraph because i will name it in the next one.

verdict, the box is the only honest screen

the verdict is simple. the box is the only honest screen in my apartment. it is also, by mom’s reckoning, the only screen worth keeping on while you do something else. the laptop wants you. the phone wants you. the work computer wants the eight hours it is owed. the box wants nothing. the box is the only one that wants nothing. that is, when you sit with it, a profound thing for a piece of furniture to want.

i am, on the rare night i give in, a watcher of the long-running sitcom about a fussy radio psychiatrist named frasier. it has been running, in some form, for longer than several of my microwaves combined. it is, in my opinion, the show the box was invented for. nothing happens. people talk. a dog watches. an elder father makes a face. the credits roll. you have eaten, you have lost no time you would have used wisely, you have laughed twice. that is the box doing exactly what the box was sold to do. that is also, for the record, what mom calls a good evening.

so i am giving in, on the term. the box is the box. mom can keep saying it. i am going to keep agreeing. the rest of you, with your laptops and your phones and your committed views about the third item in the evening news segment — you can keep doing what you do. i will be in the kitchen. the box will be on. nothing will be required of either of us. that, i would argue, is how you keep a long marriage.

you can also tell, by the way, that the elif batuman novel called the idiot, which i have written about elsewhere with great confidence and zero pages turned, is in the same family as the box. both are about people who let things happen at them, calmly, without intervening. selin lets the email arrive. mom lets the box talk. i let the microwave finish. it’s a tradition. it’s a school. it’s an entire way to be in the world.

carla just rounded the corner with the folder. she did not stop. she is, in her own way, a mother of mine. i will try the casserole rotation if she ever asks me what i did this week.

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