After spending a soul-rending hour the other evening watching the planet lurch towards catastrophe on BBC News, I did the only thing that seemed remotely survivable: I watched Michael Scott burn his foot on a George Foreman grill in The Office. Classic coping strategy. When the world darkens, reach for comedy.

Except when I mentioned this in my own office the next day, a colleague pushed back. Wasn’t that the problem? Hadn’t we all spent too long hooked up to a drip feed of television? Wasn’t I just dosing myself with distraction while the house burned down? The instinct, he suggested, shouldn’t be to laugh at Steve Carell. It should be to go outside, hold a placard, and join a march. A sitcom might feel like a salve, but what if it’s also the reason we feel so politically sapped?

He had a point. I was thinking I’d been sensibly managing my mood, when perhaps I’d simply been feeding a culture of diversion that leaves us passive. It reminded me of a book I read years ago by Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he argued that television turns the world into razzmatazz. When everything becomes entertainment, nothing carries any weight.

Suddenly, my 25-minute visit to the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company felt less like harmless relief and more like complicity. I’d only wanted a break from a news cycle that amplifies dread with every airstrike. Instead, apparently, I was another strand in the web.

But then – one mug of tea and a few deep breaths later – perspective returned. When I switched away from the invective of Donald Trump and the bellicose rhetoric of Pete Hegseth, I hadn’t felt mobilised so much as overwhelmed. I wasn’t being called to action; I was being buried under it. And so, turning to a beloved American sitcom wasn’t an escape from reality so much as an attempt to stay capable of facing it.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: what does it mean to stay informed? The modern answer seems simple. Keep the news on. Witness events in Iran as they unfold. Stay alert. But when the same burning buildings and breaking banners loop every 15 minutes, there comes a point when updates stop informing and start agitating. It’s like standing under a fire alarm and insisting that you’re learning something new from every blare.

TV news, of course, wasn’t originally built like this. For most of its history, it arrived in rationed bulletins: the Six O’Clock News, the 10 O’Clock News, Newsnight for the insomniacs. Editors had time to take stock and decide what had actually happened and what merely sounded dramatic. Then the programme ended, and the evening resumed.

Now, with images of destruction in the Middle East so constant, the effect is different. We feel survivor’s guilt from a distance. And watching comedy can start to feel shameful, as if a sitcom were a trivial response to real-life trauma. But in feeling this moral dissonance, we may be misunderstanding television’s role.

Entertainment has always existed alongside tragedy. In the Second World War, ITMA thrived on the radio. During Covid, Strictly Come Dancing still filled Saturday nights. These shows weren’t acts of denial. They were psychological lifelines. Audiences weren’t indifferent to the crises around them; they simply needed somewhere to set their anxiety down for an hour or two.

And this is where fiction does something the news rarely can. News stories break and spiral without ending. Sitcoms console. In The Office, problems arise, teeter towards disaster and tidy themselves before the end theme.

The show also holds on to an unfashionable idea: that daftness and decency can live in the same person. Michael Scott may be misguided and petty, but he’s still worthy of compassion. In a public sphere that’s permanently raging, that small faith in human decency is refreshing. So, watching an episode needn’t be seen as abandoning the world, more a reminder of what’s worth protecting.

Even so, taking refuge in stories doesn’t make me immune to my colleague’s critique. He’s right: comfort can slide very easily into distraction. We live in a culture engineered to keep us seated. Streaming platforms are so determined to prevent contact with the standby button that whole days can vanish courtesy of autoplay.

Still, television doesn’t have to anaesthetise you. Deciding what to watch – and, crucially, when to stop – can transform zombie viewing into something closer to a deliberate choice. Ignoring the “Continue Watching” prompt may be a modest act of defiance, but it is a conscious one. Not quite storming the streets with a placard, perhaps. But civic virtue comes in many flavours.

Nor does life require a stark choice between rising up and checking out. Yes, demonstrating matters. But participation doesn’t only happen in the streets. It also lives in the charities you support, the journalism you fund, the communities you show up for, the children you raise, and even the words you put into the world. And if all that is to be sustained, it requires something less dramatic but just as vital: rest.

Outrage can be energising, but sustained indefinitely, it risks becoming knackering. And no one can live entirely at top volume. Which raises a quieter possibility: that an evening spent watching a situation comedy is not civic failure, but an emotional MOT. Rest is, after all, being increasingly framed as a small act of resistance – a way of giving the knockback to a culture of ceaseless urgency.

So perhaps the real worry isn’t that we might reach for The Office in times of strife. It’s that we might do nothing else. Watching Michael Scott and his toasted toes isn’t the problem. The problem would be letting it be the only response.

In the meantime, though, something is life-affirming about watching a world in which the worst disaster is an inept middle-manager grilling his foot for breakfast instead of bacon. Spending 25 minutes in Scranton won’t fix the planet, but it may just leave us fortified enough to confront it again after the credits roll.

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