Sorry, I Don’t Have Enough Trauma to Enjoy your Favourite Show

Image Credit: IssyDoodle via Deviant Art

Look, I’m baring my soul with what I’m about to say, so please be kind… I didn’t really get Fleabag. And I just about wrapped my head around Normal People.

Sure, I enjoyed them. I loved ‘Hot Priest’; I swooned at the Irish yearning. I found just as much succour in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s raw emotions as I did in Marianne’s metamorphosis from sixth form to university. But once the credits rolled, I was left with a hollow feeling - not because I was emotionally devastated, but because I couldn’t quite figure out why everyone else was.

Cue the Reddit deepdives, desperately hoping to reverse-engineer the profound truth I’d apparently missed. And every time I came to the same unsettling conclusion: maybe my life has been too… sheltered? Maybe I just haven’t been ‘traumatised’ enough to relate.

Which is, frankly, a wild thing to admit online. Saying “sorry, I can’t vibe with this show - my parents loved me too much” makes me sound ridiculous. And to claim that I’m somehow ‘above’ the spectrum of pain, heartbreak, and father-wound discourse that fuels modern TV? I might as well tattoo ‘emotionally stable’ on my forehead and wait to be publicly stoned.

But it does make me wonder: when did trauma become the default currency of storytelling?

Every modern show worth its Rotten Tomatoes score seems to come with a mandatory trigger warning: dead parents, toxic families, abuse, addiction, abandonment - pick your poison. Cue 45 minutes of silently staring out of rain-streaked windows, and you’ve got yourself a masterpiece.

This isn’t an attack on trauma itself, obviously. These stories matter. They deserve to be told. But the sheer monotony of it all is starting to feel like a narrative crutch. If your show doesn’t feature at least one character dealing with childhood scars, is it even art?

Audiences love this stuff. Or maybe they’ve been trained to love it. Trauma adds a veneer of seriousness that makes people feel like they’re engaging with ‘art’ rather than mindless media. It’s why people will rewatch Fleabag like it’s scripture, yet feel guilty about binge-ing Emily in Paris (Although, to be fair, Emily in Paris is its own kind of traumatic experience).

But here’s my hang-up: when aesthetic pain becomes the only lens, you risk diminishing the human experience to a decidedly one-dimensional take. Where’s the joy? Where’s the silliness? Where’s the weird, nonsensical stuff that doesn’t need to be justified by suffering? I don’t know about you, but my life is not an endless reel of unprocessed wounds. Sometimes it’s just my best friend and I sharing a bag of gyoza over a debrief. And that’s worth something too.

The risk of trauma as the default is that it makes joy look frivolous. If a show isn’t about wounds and scars, it’s dismissed as lightweight, trash TV, or lacking depth. But joy isn’t lightweight. It’s radical, it’s rare, and it deserves screen time too. Personally, I don’t want every piece of art to feel like an audition tape for group therapy.

So no, I didn’t get Fleabag or Normal People. Maybe I’m too soft, too lucky, too boringly unscarred by life to resonate with every character’s wounded psyche. But that shouldn’t disqualify me from modern television, because here’s the real hot take: maybe we’ve mistaken trauma for meaning.

Sometimes, the most radical thing a show can do is make us laugh without a side of devastation. And if modern shows are going to keep selling trauma as the default, then maybe it’s okay to occasionally sit it out, close Reddit, and embrace the radical notion that entertainment can sometimes just… entertain.