SUMMARY
TV and movies are often dismissed as passive escapism, but the research and clinical reality is more interesting than that. Screen storytelling can provide emotional validation, model resilience, offer safe distance from difficult feelings, facilitate parasocial connection, and reduce loneliness in meaningful ways. This post makes the evidence-based case for your Netflix habit — and also explores the important difference between therapeutic screen engagement and numbing avoidance.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- What Sarah’s Friday Night Reveals
- What Parasocial Relationships Actually Are
- The Research on Screen Storytelling and Mental Health
- Five Psychological Functions TV and Movies Can Serve
- Free Guide
- The Both/And: When Screen Time Helps and When It Doesn’t
- The Systemic Lens: Why Escapism Gets Judged
- How to Use Screen Time Therapeutically
- Frequently Asked Questions
- References & Related Reading
What Sarah’s Friday Night Reveals
Sarah, a 36-year-old public defender, comes home on Fridays to a specific ritual: she changes out of her work clothes, heats up whatever she made earlier in the week, and puts on a show she’s seen before. Not a new show — a familiar one. Something she knows the plot of, loves the characters in, can sink into without the cognitive demand of following an unfamiliar story.
She mentioned this ritual somewhat apologetically in session one day, as if she were confessing to something shameful. She half-laughed: “I know I should probably be meditating or journaling or doing something productive. But I just… I need to go somewhere that feels safe for a few hours.”
I told her what I actually think: that her Friday ritual is not laziness and it is not avoidance. It is an intelligent, self-regulating behavior. And the research supports this more robustly than most people realize.
DEFINITION
Parasocial Relationships
One-sided emotional bonds that viewers develop with fictional characters, actors, or media personalities. Despite being non-reciprocal, these relationships activate genuine psychological processes — the same neural circuits involved in real social connection. They can provide a sense of belonging, model emotional coping, and offer the experience of relationship without the full vulnerability and unpredictability of real-world connection.
The Research on Screen Storytelling and Mental Health
Dr. Raymond Mar, PhD, psychologist at York University, has spent years studying the psychological effects of narrative fiction — in books, film, and TV. His research demonstrates that exposure to rich, character-driven narratives activates the same social cognition networks that real-world social experience does. People who consume more narrative fiction show higher scores on measures of empathy and theory of mind — the capacity to understand and anticipate others’ mental states.
This makes intuitive sense: stories give us a safe, controlled context for practicing emotional attunement. We feel what the character feels, imagine their perspective, and process emotional material that might be too activating if encountered directly in our own lives.
Dr. Shira Gabriel, PhD, social psychologist at the University at Buffalo, has documented the benefits of parasocial relationships specifically. Her research shows that parasocial bonds provide genuine social belongingness, reduce loneliness, and support self-esteem and positive mood. Crucially, these benefits are not diminished by the non-reciprocal nature of the bond — the psychological system that registers belonging doesn’t require mutuality to function.
For individuals with relational trauma backgrounds — for whom real-world intimacy may be more anxiety-provoking, less predictable, or harder to access — the relative safety of parasocial connection may serve a genuinely therapeutic function. This doesn’t mean parasocial bonds should replace real ones. But it does mean the Friday night TV ritual deserves more respect than it typically gets.
“Stories are a communal currency of humanity.” — Tahir Shah, author and storyteller, In Arabian Nights
Five Psychological Functions TV and Movies Can Serve
1. Emotional validation and normalization. Watching characters navigate experiences that mirror your own — grief, anxiety, complicated family dynamics, the particular loneliness of a driven woman in a world that doesn’t quite fit her — provides a form of recognition that can feel genuinely therapeutic. I’m not the only one who feels this way is one of the most healing experiences available to human beings, and stories deliver it efficiently.
2. Safe-distance processing. Stories allow us to encounter difficult emotional territory at a degree of remove that makes it more bearable. A character’s grief can help us access and process our own, because the safety of fiction allows the nervous system to engage rather than defend. This is part of why people cry at movies even when they’re “fine” — the fictional permission slip allows emotional access that felt too dangerous in direct form.
3. Modeling of coping and resilience. Characters who survive hard things, who make difficult choices, who grow through adversity, model possibilities for the viewer. This is not trivial. For people who didn’t have models of healthy coping growing up, stories can be genuine teachers — demonstrations, in compressed and accessible form, of what it might look like to navigate a situation you’ve never seen navigated well.
4. Nervous system regulation. The comfortable, familiar nature of a favorite show can serve as a co-regulatory tool — the equivalent, neurologically, of the soothing presence of a calm other. For Sarah, her Friday show is regulating because it’s predictable, safe, and pleasurable. Her nervous system genuinely settles in its presence. This is not nothing.
5. Social connection and community. Shared cultural objects — shows everyone is watching, films that become part of cultural conversation — create social connection and belonging. Having something to talk about with people, a shared reference, a reason to gather (even virtually) is part of the social fabric. For people who struggle with the unpredictability of more intimate connection, the relative accessibility of fandom communities can be a genuine social resource.
A Reason to Keep Going
25 pages of what I actually say to clients when they are in the dark. Somatic tools, cognitive anchors, and 40 grounded, honest reasons to stay. No platitudes.
The Both/And: When Screen Time Helps and When It Doesn’t
Here is the necessary nuance: TV and movies can serve genuine psychological functions, and they can also be used for avoidance in ways that ultimately compound difficulties rather than address them. Both things are true. The question is not whether screen time is good or bad — it’s what function it’s serving in a given person’s life at a given time.
The distinction I use with clients is this: is the screen time helping you regulate and restore so that you can engage with your life afterward? Or is it helping you avoid something important — grief you haven’t allowed yourself to feel, a conversation you need to have, a decision you’ve been postponing — in a way that makes those things larger over time?
Both uses are real. Most people use screens for both functions at different times. The useful question isn’t “am I watching too much TV?” It’s “what is this watching doing for me right now — and is that what I actually need?”
Priya, a 40-year-old architect I worked with, realized at one point that she’d been using a particular show to avoid processing her mother’s death. “I noticed I wasn’t crying anymore,” she said. “I was just watching. The show was kind of like a buffer between me and the grief.” That’s a different use than Sarah’s Friday regulation. Neither is inherently wrong — but knowing which one you’re doing matters.
The Systemic Lens: Why Escapism Gets Judged
The cultural judgment of “escapism” is worth examining. In a productivity-obsessed culture, activities that don’t produce tangible outputs — that are purely about rest, pleasure, or restoration — are frequently devalued and pathologized. The person who spends Saturday afternoon watching TV is implicitly coded as lazy, unambitious, or avoidant. The person who spends the same Saturday working is virtuous and driven.
This framework is deeply problematic — and it falls particularly hard on women, who are already under cultural pressure to be perpetually productive, endlessly available, and always optimizing. The woman who grants herself unproductive hours for restoration is often doing something her body and mind genuinely require. The judgment of that rest as laziness is the culture’s problem, not hers.
Additionally, the specific critique of screen time tends to gloss over the genuine quality difference between different kinds of screen engagement. Watching a rich, character-driven drama with emotional depth is a different activity, neurologically and psychologically, than scrolling through social media comparisons. Both involve screens. The effects on the nervous system are quite different.
How to Use Screen Time Therapeutically
If you want to be more intentional about what your screen time is doing for you, a few practices:
Notice the function. Before or after watching, ask: what am I looking for in this? Rest? Emotional processing? Distraction? Company? There’s no wrong answer — knowing the function helps you use the tool more deliberately.
Pay attention to what you reach for. The shows you’re drawn to in hard times often say something about what your nervous system needs or what emotional material it’s working on. If you find yourself drawn to particular themes, stories, or characters, curiosity rather than judgment about that is usually more useful.
Notice the after. Do you feel more regulated after watching, or more numbed? Do you feel more connected to yourself and your life, or more dissociated from it? This is useful information about how the particular viewing is functioning for you.
Watch with someone sometimes. The communal experience of watching together — discussing, reacting, sharing — amplifies some of the connective benefits of the story experience. It also turns what could be an isolating activity into a genuine relational one.
Let yourself be moved. If a show or film touches something in you — if it makes you cry, or laugh unexpectedly, or feel something you haven’t let yourself feel — don’t rush past it. Sit in it for a moment. That emotional access is part of the value.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Is it healthy to form emotional attachments to fictional characters?
Yes, within reason. Parasocial attachments to fictional characters are a normal and well-documented psychological phenomenon. They provide genuine psychological benefits, including belonging and social modeling. The concern is only if parasocial bonds become a substitute for all real-world connection rather than a supplement to it — or if distress when a show ends or a character is killed is significantly disproportionate to the fictional nature of the loss.
Why do I want to rewatch shows I’ve already seen?
Familiarity is regulating. A show you’ve seen before is predictable — you know what will happen, who will be safe, what the emotional arc is. For people whose nervous systems were shaped by unpredictable early environments, the predictability of a known story can be genuinely soothing. Rewatching is not a sign of limited imagination. It’s a form of nervous system stewardship.
How do I know if my screen time has become avoidance?
A few signals: if you consistently feel worse (more numb, more anxious, more dissociated) after watching than before; if specific things you know you need to address — conversations, decisions, emotional processing — have been shelved for weeks in favor of screens; if the watching has become more compulsive than enjoyable. The feeling of watching because you can’t stop rather than because you want to is a useful signal worth paying attention to.
Are there shows or genres that are particularly good or bad for mental health?
The research is nuanced here. Content that features realistic emotional complexity, character growth, and resolution tends to provide more of the beneficial functions. Content that is purely activating without resolution — relentless violence, horror that doesn’t conclude, doom scrolling-style true crime — can add to rather than reduce nervous system load. That said, individual responses vary significantly, and the most important criterion is often how you feel after a particular type of content rather than what the research says in aggregate.
Can watching TV actually help me process grief or difficult emotions?
Sometimes, yes. Stories that engage with grief, loss, or difficulty can provide what researchers call “narrative access” — a path into emotional territory that is harder to approach directly. If you find yourself crying at a fictional loss and realizing you’re also crying about something real in your own life, that’s the story doing what stories are for. The fictional frame gives the emotion permission to move. That can be genuinely therapeutic, though it’s rarely a complete substitute for more direct processing.
REFERENCES & RELATED READING
- Mar, Raymond A., and Keith Oatley. “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, no. 3 (2008): 173–192. raymondmar.ca
- Gabriel, Shira, et al. “Meet the Parkers: The Effect of Parasocial Relationships with Fictional Families on the Social Self.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 33, no. 3 (2016): 339–358.
- Derrick, Jaye L., et al. “Social surrogacy: How favored television programs provide the experience of belonging.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45, no. 2 (2009): 352–362.
- Zillmann, Dolf. “Mood Management: Using Entertainment to Full Advantage.” In Communication, Social Cognition, and Affect, 1988.
Sarah texted me a few weeks after that session, slightly amused: “I watched three episodes of my comfort show last night after a hard week and felt zero guilt about it. First time ever.” She paused, then added: “I think I needed permission. From research, apparently.”
You have it. The Friday night show, the comfort rewatch, the parasocial friend group — these are not shameful. They are among the many ways human beings find comfort, connection, and restoration in a world that asks a great deal of them. Use them wisely. Let yourself enjoy them. And notice, with curiosity rather than judgment, what they’re doing for you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Annie Wright, LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist, trauma-informed executive coach, and founder of Evergreen Counseling in Berkeley, CA. She is passionate about evidence-based mental health care that takes the whole person seriously — including their Netflix habits. Licensed in California and Florida. Learn more about working with Annie.
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Annie Wright
LMFT · 15,000+ Clinical Hours · W.W. Norton Author · Psychology Today ColumnistAnnie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist, relational trauma specialist, and the founder and successfully exited CEO of a large California trauma-informed therapy center. A W.W. Norton published author, she writes the weekly Substack Strong & Stable and her work and expert opinions have appeared in NPR, NBC, Forbes, Business Insider, The Boston Globe, and The Information.
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