My Smart TV Makes Entertainment a Chore
Our smart TV seemed to amplify a sense of urgency. The simple, daily question, “What should we watch?” suddenly had stakes.
By Lauren Michele Jackson
Since I first subscribed to Hulu — or rather, since I began freeloading my parents’ Hulu subscription — all I ever wanted was a way to integrate the applications taking over my life via handheld devices onto the behemoth screen that concenters the living room in my apartment. Of course, this wasn’t some prescient pipe dream, or anything. We, in humankind, had made it possible to stream online videos as at-home entertainment for quite some time before I finally had access to the hybrid progeny of tube and tech — the Smart TV.
The transition to smarter, web-ier watching had one pit stop between. My first Northside apartment, shared with a roommate with tastes straight from West Elm (for a visual), introduced another first: Chromecast. It was a lovely but imperfect partnership. Netflix and YouTube ran like a dream, ushering in a ritual I never gave name to but will here call “Beyoncé Fridays,” which involved casting Beyoncé’s videography in chronological order (from “No, No, No Pt. 2” onward) while pregaming alone for a night out. Past these apps, however, it was tug-and-pull mirroring content from…
