Daily Inspiration Quote by Vincent Canby

Canby’s line turns April TV into a rubbernecking ritual, and the choice of “accident” is doing the heavy lifting: it’s not just that we can’t look away, it’s that we feel vaguely ashamed for looking and keep doing it anyway. As a critic, he’s less interested in condemning television than in diagnosing the bargain it offers viewers: spectacle in exchange for complicity. “Drawn” suggests magnetism rather than choice; the couch becomes a curbside, the screen a cordoned-off crash site where we get proximity without responsibility.

The context is crucial: April is a seasonal spike in broadcast attention, tied to sweeps, spring events, and the industry’s hunger for ratings. Canby is implicitly calling out how TV manufactures urgency and catastrophe to keep audiences from wandering. The comparison lands because accidents collapse moral categories. You don’t want harm, but you want the story. You’re repelled by the violence, attracted by the clarity of it: something happened, someone’s to blame, there are images to prove it.

Subtextually, he’s also puncturing the idea of “shared national experience” as noble. What unites us isn’t civic enlightenment; it’s synchronized gawking. The wit is cool, not flamboyant: a single simile exposes a whole ecosystem of attention economics before “attention economy” was a phrase. Canby’s critique still scans because today’s feeds are just the accident scene with a comment section, and we’re still slowing down to stare.