"Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life"

Paglia points to television’s peculiar fidelity to the rhythms and contradictions of ordinary life. Books, with their linear plots, controlled pacing, and interior monologues, distill experience into coherent arcs. Television, by contrast, floods the senses with a stream of images, interruptions, and tonal shifts: news breaks into sitcoms, commercials fracture suspense, a sports highlight reel follows a catastrophe. That simultaneity and abruptness mimic the day’s psychic weather, where attention is pulled, moods swing, and narrative closure rarely arrives.

The “madness” is not mere sensationalism; it is the fragmentation, repetition, and ritualized spectacle that structure social existence. Channel surfing resembles the mind’s restless scanning; the laugh track echoes the demand for communal cues; cliffhangers and serial formats mirror the way lives advance by episodes, not epics. Even television’s artifices, makeup, lighting, the polished anchor, mirror the grooming and performance required in offices and families. Advertising condenses desire and anxiety into thirty seconds, much as a passing billboard or a notification punctures thought and redirects longing.

Live TV intensifies the claim to reality: elections unfolding in real time, disasters transmitted as they happen, witnesses speaking before narratives solidify. Books offer perspective and depth, but they arrive after the fact, carefully shaped. Television collapses that delay and exposes the chaos of events before understanding sets in. Its closeness to reality lies not in truthfulness but in temporal proximity and the sensory churn that defines contemporary experience.

There is danger here: distortion thrives in speed, and the spectacle can numb. Yet the very excess that alarms critics reveals a human appetite for drama, repetition, and tribe. To watch TV is to see society rehearsing itself, its fears, desires, jokes, and rituals, at a pace that matches the pulse of the street, the office, the home. The madness belongs to us. And its mirror rarely flatters, yet clarifies us.