You know the posture. Sofa, television, phone held at chest height like a hymn book. A character on screen announces that she is going to the airport now, that she is devastated about the airport, that the airport reminds her of her father. You glance up. You already knew all of that, because she said it eleven minutes ago, and will say it again before the credits. This is not bad writing, exactly. It is writing that has been briefed about you.
In January, on Joe Rogan's podcast, Matt Damon described the notes that came with Netflix's The Rip: move the big set piece into the first five minutes so people don't tune out, and reiterate the plot "three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they're watching." He contrasted this with the architecture he learned coming up — three set pieces, one per act, ramping toward the finale. Sitting beside him, Ben Affleck offered the counter-example: Netflix's own Adolescence, which "didn't do any of that shit," full of long shots of a boy's back, and is great. Netflix, asked for comment by the Hollywood Reporter, had "nothing to add."
Damon is not the only one saying the quiet part. Jameela Jamil told Romesh Ranganathan in November that writers are being told to write "for second screen viewing," with everything "reiterated via the script and then dialogue." David Harbour has described studios asking for "a certain kind of thing that will play in the background." Justine Bateman said back in 2023 that she'd heard of scripts getting the note that they "isn't second screen enough." And in an n+1 essay called "Casual Viewing," Will Tavlin reported screenwriters being instructed to "have this character announce what they're doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along" — a directive you can hear, verbatim-ish, in a film like Irish Wish, where Lindsay Lohan helpfully narrates her own emotional arc in case you were checking email.
To be fair, the picture is contested. When the Guardian asked around, three writers who had worked for Netflix said they'd never received such a note; Danny Brocklehurst, whose Fool Me Once topped the UK chart, said no one he knows has either. So perhaps the instruction travels unevenly — aimed at certain budget tiers, certain genres, the content middle where completion is the product. But that the phrase "second screen" exists as a note at all, that anyone can be accused of not being second-screen enough, tells you the constraint is real and has a name.
The dashboard in the writers' room
Here is what makes this genuinely strange, rather than merely depressing. Art forms absorb their audiences all the time — the novel serialised for cliffhangers, the pop single built for radio. But those pressures shaped what got made: more sensation, more hooks. This pressure is shaping the craft itself, the formal grammar of how a scene works. Dialogue is no longer only what characters say to each other; it is a parallel audio track describing the picture for people who cannot see it, because they are looking at a smaller picture. The screenplay has quietly become a radio play with images attached.
And the author of this change is nobody. There is no auteur of ambient television, no manifesto. Kyle Chayka coined "ambient TV" in 2020 to describe shows designed to wash over you, but the design brief isn't coming from a critic or a showrunner — it's coming from a completion metric on an analytics dashboard, from the measurable fact that attention leaks and the corporate decision to chase it down the drain. The phone in your hand is, functionally, an uncredited co-writer on everything you half-watch. It has notes.
We have been here before, in a different sense organ. During the loudness wars, labels mastered records hotter and hotter so they'd leap out of the radio, each track compressing its quiet and loud into one undifferentiated blare — until the quiet parts, the dynamic range, the actual texture of music, were sacrificed to win three seconds of a listener's attention. Nobody decided music should sound worse. Each individual decision was rational. The aggregate was a degraded medium, and the listeners — the very people being competed for — got thinner sound. The streaming era's version plays out in dialogue instead of decibels: every production rationally optimising for the distracted viewer, the aggregate being a cinema that assumes you are somewhere else.
You can even see the other half of the adaptation if you look down. The caption boom — a generation that watches everything with subtitles on, not from necessity but because dialogue now competes with podcasts, group chats and the general roar — is the audience's own workaround, its way of splitting attention between two screens without losing either thread. We subtitle the TV the way the TV narrates itself to us. Both are coping mechanisms for a single fact: nobody is fully present anywhere, and everyone, including the studios, has quietly made their peace with it.
Written for the room you're not in
The tempting frame is decline — they don't make them like they used to. Resist it. Adolescence exists, on the same platform, made by people who refused the note, and it found its audience anyway. The old system produced plenty of unwatchable sludge too. What's new isn't badness; it's the invisibility of the constraint. When a film is flabby because a producer wanted a third-act explosion, that's a person making a choice you can argue with. When the plot is restated four times because a retention curve dips at minute twelve, there's no one to argue with. The dashboard doesn't read scripts. It doesn't love movies. It just reports, accurately, that you left.
Which is the uncomfortable part. The note exists because the behaviour exists, and the behaviour is ours. Netflix didn't invent the phone on the sofa; it simply believed what we showed it, and started building for the people we actually are at 10:40 on a Tuesday. Every film now premieres in a room where half the audience is somewhere else — and increasingly, it's written for them.
So the next time a character helpfully explains what just happened, consider that she isn't talking to the other people in the scene. She's talking to you, or rather to the version of you the metrics can see: the one with the hymn book, half-listening, being narrated at through the bottom of the glass.