James Poniewozik

TV Critic

Bite-Size, Low-Tech TV

The scene: someone’s backyard. The star: a pine cone, to which someone has attached googly eyes, Popsicle-stick arms and a string. An unseen force tugs on the line, and the pine cone (his name is Willy) ascends spiraling heavenward, to the gushing chorus of Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up.”

The video is 11 seconds of perfect idiocy. I have laughed every time I watched it; I am laughing as I type this out. It’s absurd and low-tech and parodic but also — can an inanimate seed cluster be joyful? Well, this one is. The clip is like the climax to an inspirational movie no one will ever make.

This, I discovered after recently downloading TikTok for the first time, is the beauty of the platform. Like Vine before it, it’s all climaxes. It’s all punch lines and dance outbursts and dramatic (or comedic) reveals.

As a professional TV watcher in 2019, I’m immersed in maximalist video — Netflix binges, “Game of Thrones.” Yet what we often take away from these giant entertainments are the moments: the “Neverending Story” singalong in “Stranger Things,” Arya Stark leaping out of the dark at the Night King.

TikTok gives you nothing but the singalongs and leaps. It is not a 21-course meal. It’s a bottomless gumball machine, serving up ephemeral treats. Flick — hamster eating a tiny pancake! Flick — guy vacuum-sealing himself into a garbage bag!

This is not “TV” as recognizable to anyone who grew up when televisions were furniture. It’s what TV becomes when it’s something you pull out of your pocket, standing on a cashier line, sitting on a bus.

So fittingly, it belongs creatively to people who were holding a screen since they could make a fist. Videos are set in teenage bedrooms, classrooms, suburban living rooms. A girl dances to audio of her mom arguing with her boyfriend (#someonegetmymomagoodman), an unsettling slice of dark irony. A group of friends creates an “Avengers assemble” tableau by jumping backward into a swimming pool, then reversing the video. A dancer busts an intricate set of moves to a Drake song in front of a kitchen island, while an older man — her dad? — wanders into the frame in the background, unnoticed.

It’s easy for An Old on TikTok — certainly this middle-aged viewer, maybe anyone north of 20 — to feel like the wandering dad in the hallway, an interloper in an impenetrable hangout of references, Billie Eilish memes and comedy bits about homework, driver’s ed and #dormlife.

But the more time I spent with the app, the more I realized that any feeling of exclusion I had was my own baggage. The pervasive feeling I got from TikTok was inclusion. It wasn’t, like Instagram, trying to persuade me of its users’ happiness, or, like Twitter, of their rightness. Instead the vibe is: Look at this cool thing I did. What can you do?

I don’t know if I’ve developed a new habit; my streaming and TiVo backlogs have too great a hold on me. But the beauty of this new relationship is how little commitment it demands. TikTok is there, whenever I want to be raised up, for 11 seconds at a time.