The Neuroscience of a ‘Comfort Show’
WELLBEING
Zeena Stetiya
9/3/20264 min read
Why We Keep Returning to the Stories We Already Know
You open up your TV, and there are hundreds of new options for you to watch. After scrolling for 10 minutes, you reject every suggestion and somehow end up watching the same show you’ve already seen 3 times.
It may seem dull or uneventful, but your brain tells a different story. Rewatching a show you already know gives you something that entertainment cannot: predictability. When life feels stressful, uncertain, or mentally exhausting, it can be strangely comforting to know exactly what is going to happen.
A comfort show is usually more than just background noise. It can be a familiar place for the brain to take a break.
No Plot Twists, No Problem
The brain constantly uses past experiences in order to prepare for what is coming up in the future. Therefore, it’s not surprising that a new television show gives the brain a lot to deal with: who are these characters? What is important, and where is it going?
With a familiar TV show, there is no ambiguity. You can just concentrate on the events you have already seen and know what to expect.
This may provide an explanation as to why people tend to watch something familiar after a long day of school, work, or decision-making, which depletes your mind and makes starting a new show feel like yet another task to be completed.
One study by psychologist Jaye Derrick looked at this idea in the setting of familiar fictional worlds. Participants who engaged with a favourite television show after a mentally exhausting task showed greater persistence on a subsequent task. The show didn’t literally recharge their brains, but it seemed to offer a low-pressure form of psychological recovery (Derrick, 2013).
Spoilers, Not So Bad After All, Huh?
The stress of uncertainty stems from the fact that the brain doesn’t know what to prepare for. With a comfort show, there is no fear of your favorite character suddenly being gone or the ending emotionally destroying you. Even if the plot is dramatic, you know already how it all ends.
In a 2016 experiment, researchers found that people got most stressed when they did not know whether they would receive a mild electric shock, rather than when they knew for sure they would. Of course a TV show is obviously very different, but the finding demonstrates how uncertainty in and of itself can cause stress (de Berker et al., 2016).
One known storyline gets rid of that uncertainty. Emotional enough to keep your interest, predictable enough to feel safe.
The Friends Who Live Behind Your Screen
When one spends a great deal of time watching a certain TV show, it is very common for them to feel like they have acquired a certain level of familiarity with these personalities. The watcher begins to recognize the actions of these characters, understand their personality types, and sometimes even know exactly what they will be saying.
Such types of relationships are called parasocial relationships. While everyone involved in a parasocial relationship is aware of its one-sided factor, they still feel a level of social comfort (Derrick et al., 2009).
Sometimes, We Are Rewatching Not Just a Show, But a Memory
A show you watched as a child, or during summer vacation, or at a better time in your life, can remind you of where you were and how you felt. For example, it may start with a familiar theme song that can take you back to another time.
That’s nostalgia. Research by psychologist Constantine Sedikides found nostalgia can enhance self-continuity—the sense that our past and present selves are linked. This link can be reassuring in times of transition (Sedikides et al., 2016).
Your comfort show might be comforting for more reasons than the story itself. It might also bring you back to the version of yourself that first saw it.
One More Episode—or One Too Many?
Watching a show you’ve already seen isn’t necessarily unhealthy. It can help you relax, balance your emotions, or ease you out of a stressful day.
But the difference between comfort and avoidance is important to distinguish. A key question is, how do I feel afterward?
If you feel calmer and restored after an episode, then that may be true downtime. However, if you’re sacrificing sleep, responsibilities, or real connection for hours of regular rewatching and it leaves you feeling worse, it may be functioning more as an escape than a recovery.
The difference isn’t whether you watch your favorite show a fifth time; it's whether the habit is supporting your well-being or slyly interfering with it.
A Little Familiarity Never Hurt
Our brains are constantly responding to change, uncertainty, and endless new information every day. A comfort show does the opposite: it gives us familiar faces, predictable endings, and a world whose rules we understand.
So you don't have to feel guilty about skipping a whole bunch of new releases to hit play on the same old episode again. Your brain might just be hungry for something predictable—a story that lets you know that at least for the next twenty minutes things will unfold exactly as you expect.
References
Derrick, J. L. (2013). Energized by television: Familiar fictional worlds restore self-control. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4(3), 299–307. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550612454889
de Berker, A. O., Rutledge, R. B., Mathys, C., Marshall, L., Cross, G. F., Dolan, R. J., & Bestmann, S. (2016). Computations of uncertainty mediate acute stress responses in humans. Nature Communications, 7, 10996. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10996
Derrick, J. L., Gabriel, S., & Hugenberg, K. (2009). Social surrogacy: How favored television programs provide the experience of belonging. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(2), 352–362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.003
Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Routledge, C., & Arndt, J. (2016). Nostalgia fosters self-continuity: Uncovering the mechanism (social connectedness) and consequence (eudaimonic well-being). Emotion, 16(4), 524–539. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000136