In the Age of Endless Streaming, Nostalgia Still Wins

If you watch videos on YouTube often enough, you won’t even need to subscribe to any channel; the algorithm figures out your viewing habits and programing preferences and starts pushing more of the same things to your feed. Mine, for example, is a mix of sketch clips from Saturday Night Live and late-night American talk shows, geopolitical documentary-style explainer-type videos from creators like Real Life Lore and The Infographics Show, and the whole cottage industry of deep dives and Easter egg references from Marvel movies and TV shows like those from Screencrush and Heavy Spoilers.

And then there is content that you had no idea was out there but that the YouTube gods suddenly surface to your feed with the confidence that you just might take interest based on a tangential connection to stuff you’ve already watched. That’s how I suddenly got hooked into watching episodes of two classic TV shows from my childhood: the animated series Visionaries, and the live-action teen sitcom Parker Lewis Can’t Lose.

Visionaries, for those unlucky enough not to have caught the series when it first aired back in the 1980s, tells the story of a group of knights bestowed magical powers at a time when technology suddenly and inexplicably stops working in the distant planet of Prysmos. The good knights call themselves the Spectral Knights and are led by the brave and heroic Leoric, while the bad knights are led by Darkstorm and are called the Darkling Lords.

Each knight is imbued with the magical ability to transform themselves into animals that reflect their innermost qualities and personalities. For instance, Leoric’s totem is the lion, Witterquick is the cheetah, Cryotek is the bear, Feryl is the Wolf, Arzon is the eagle, Ectar is the fox, and Galadria is the dolphin. On the side of the Darkling Lords, Darkstorm is a mollusk, Mortdredd is a beetle, Reekon is a lizard, Cindarr is a gorilla, Cravex a phylot (a type of prehistoric winged creature), Lexor an armadillo, and Virulina a shark.

Some of the knights also carried power staffs that possessed additional powers that were brought to life through incantations that they said out loud.

Visionaries only lasted one season of 13 episodes, but it left such an impression on me as a kid growing up in the 80s that when I discovered that somebody had uploaded all 13 episodes on YouTube, I watched all of them over one weekend.

It was the same with Parker Lewis Can’t Lose. The comedy series told the story of the titular hero, a high school cool guy who was always getting mixed up in all sorts of hijinks with his two best friends, rocker Mikey and nerdy freshman Jerry. Lewis’s nemesis, with whom he and his friends often butted heads with, was the principal Ms. Musso, along with her right-hand enforcer Frank Lemmer, and his kid sister Shelley.

What was different about this show was how it was shot cartoon-style, with absurd and often surreal elements, creative camera angles, and how Lewis often broke the fourth wall. Airing for three seasons from 1990 to 1993, the show somehow found its way into Philippine TV back in the day, and I have vague memories of watching it and thinking how cool it was, especially Parker Lewis’s character. He often wore these colorful button-down long-sleeved shirts that heavily influenced how I dressed (at least, during that time). And so one day, when the series’ pilot episode somehow appeared on my Recommended for You queue, I found myself putting off watching that new Netflix movie I was hoping to catch and settled in to watch a TV show from (gulp) over 35 years ago.

Come to think of it, for years now, I’ve found it to be much easier to click on video content that feels familiar and comforting each time I sink into the couch after a long day at work. With thousands of movies and TV shows available at the swish of a remote from streaming sites like Netflix, the mere act of choosing has become such a chore when it comes to picking out something to watch. I’m sure I’m not the first to suffer from analysis paralysis when deciding on what to stare at on the screen for the next couple of hours.

This is why I often spend more time browsing the selection of films and TV series than watching the actual content once I’ve finally decided. And I’m definitely not alone in this habit. A survey by Talker Research and UserTesting found that the average viewer spends about 20 minutes a day—or up to 110 hours a year—just scrolling and searching for something to watch. Meanwhile, a separate Nielsen study reported that the average viewer spends about 10.5 minutes searching before deciding, with one in five users feeling so overwhelmed that they just turn off the TV entirely.

The result, at least for me, is that I often just eventually give up and pick something I’ve already seen many, many times before, such as an episode of Friends, Modern Family or Superstore, or the Lord of the Rings or any of the Harry Potter films. And there’re numerous reasons why many of us just end up rewatching the same shows. According to the Newport Institute, these include a decreased risk of emotional ambush (avoiding unpredictability or dread with new content), reduced cognitive load (less effort expended to process new information, plots or narrative structure), somatic safety (or settling into something certain as opposed to something unfamiliar that might lead to anxiety or stress), and good old-fashioned nostalgia.

Out of all these reasons, it’s the last one that fascinates me the most. Nostalgia is that warm fuzzy feeling we get from remembering something that brought us pleasure or happiness during simpler times in our lives. Watching a TV show that we enjoyed especially during our childhood triggers that feeling, and we somehow feel comforted, contented and even safe when it’s playing on our screen.

Nostalgia is likely the feeling I was chasing after when Visionaries and Parker Lewis Can’t Lose popped up on my YouTube home page. And while there may be a million new TV shows competing for my click on dozens of other streaming sites, can you really blame a geriatric millennial like me for choosing a couple of decades-old shows that takes me back to the days when TVs had dials and there were only a handful of channels showing a finite number of programs? For a few minutes or hours, we shut out the realities of the present and regress to a time and place when things weren’t so complicated, when adult responsibilities were nonexistent, and all that mattered were what sort of adventures and mischief a bunch of magical knights and a few high school students and their pals got into that week.