My grandmother called me last Tuesday. Not to check in, not for a birthday, but to ask a question that stopped me cold: "Did you see who got eliminated on Dancing with the Stars last night?"
I hadn't. I don't. And neither, it turns out, did most of the country.
Here's the number that should bother you: the season finale of Dancing with the Stars drew roughly 4.5 million viewers. In 2010, that same show pulled in over 24 million. We didn't just stop watching one dance competition. We stopped watching the same thing as each other, and we've been quietly pretending that's fine.
For two decades, Dancing with the Stars was the rare American ritual that crossed every line — red state and blue state, grandma and grandkid, the kind of show you could bring up at work on Wednesday without checking anyone's politics first. A B-list actress and a football player, spray-tanned and sequined, gave us something we now almost never have: a conversation with no ideological entry fee.
Consider what replaced it. We now have infinite content and zero common ground. Your neighbor is eight seasons deep into a Norwegian crime drama you'll never hear of. Your coworker watches a man review sandwiches for forty minutes. Your teenager watches someone else's teenager do a dance in a kitchen. Everyone is entertained. Nobody is together.
The sociologists have a name for this — the collapse of "watercooler television" — but the phrase undersells the damage. Shared entertainment wasn't trivial. It was civic glue in a country that has run out of it. When we watched the same finale, we at least agreed on the facts of what happened. We argued about who deserved to win, not whether the show existed. Now we can't even agree on whether the news is real, and we wonder why.
The economics did this to us, too. Network television couldn't survive streaming's math. Why sell one ad to 22 million people when you can sell a thousand micro-ads to a thousand micro-audiences? Efficiency won. Community lost. Our attention got sliced into profitable slivers, and we called it choice.
And there's a darker cost. Loneliness in America is now a public health emergency — the surgeon general said as much. We scroll alone, at night, next to someone we love, watching different screens. We have more shows than any generation in history and fewer moments we'll remember together. My grandmother didn't want my opinion on the cha-cha. She wanted to talk to me. The show was just the excuse. We don't have many excuses left.
So here's my modest, unfashionable proposal: pick one thing. One show, one game, one finale. Watch it live. Text someone about it. Not because it's good — most of it isn't — but because being a country requires occasionally sharing the same room, even a virtual one. A nation that can't agree on who won a dance competition will not long agree on anything that matters.
We didn't lose Dancing with the Stars. We lost the thing it was quietly holding together — the assumption that we're all, at least sometimes, watching the same story. That's not nostalgia. That's a warning.