When Ted Lasso premiered in the summer of 2020, the show was hailed as an antidote for the lockdown blues. Jason Sudeikis’s coach was an indomitable cheerleader for the pandemic age, and TV executives began chasing Ted’s tail, seeking out uplifting projects to elevate the national mood. But the funny thing is, in scary times, people don’t necessarily turn to the brightest forms of entertainment. Many of us have been finding a strange kind of solace in dark matter.

“I got a lot of selfies of people crying during episode 10,” says Patrick Somerville, showrunner of Station Eleven. The HBO Max limited series about a theater troupe making art in the aftermath of a horrific worldwide plague was developed long before COVID, but most of it was shot and aired as we lived out our own mass mortality nightmare. “I think that it’s generally good for people to feel their feelings that don’t have a place to go,” Somerville says. “We have a lot of feelings that need to come out.”

As a former goth who spent thousands of adolescent hours steeping in melancholy music, I know the power of art that mirrors your ugly feelings. Over the last year, I found myself drawn to bleaker-than-thou TV like Squid Game, The Handmaid’s Tale, Severance, Euphoria, The Staircase, and Under the Banner of Heaven. Call it doombingeing: the TV-drama counterpart to doomscrolling through the endlessly refreshed supply of bad news. The media psychology scholar Elizabeth L. Cohen, an associate professor at West Virginia University and an editor of the Psychology of Popular Media journal, has found herself staring into the televisual abyss too. “I get a lot of comfort personally from dark programs,” she says. “It just transports me in a different way than a light sitcom would.”

It might seem counterintuitive to expose ourselves to stories that scare or disgust us when we’re already vibrating with anxiety, but Cohen begs to differ. “We assume that we’re going to entertainment because we enjoy it…but there are so many other reasons. We can experiment with some of those difficult emotions, [and] having the experiences in a safe environment can be really beneficial to developing ourselves.” 

A lot of us have been marinating in unexpressed grief—for friends and family members lost to the pandemic, for our pre-COVID world, for the desolate state of politics and the planet—without even realizing it. “We’re in very, very dark times right now,” says Dustin Lance Black, whose FX limited series, Under the Banner of Heaven, contextualizes the brutal 1984 murder of a young woman and her baby within the history of the Mormon church. “The pandemic is a part of it, the economy is a part of it. People feel like their lives are shrinking. They’re feeling like they don’t know what’s around the corner. And so I’m not surprised that people want to see a reflection of that: How do other people deal with such horror or terror?”

Black spent a decade trying to adapt Under the Banner of Heaven because it felt personal to him: As a young gay boy growing up Mormon, he had watched the adults around him rationalize violence against women. The true story grew ever more resonant with the rise of Donald Trump and the creation of anti-government, gun-toting militias and fundamentalist fervor. “All of a sudden, we have the campaign slogan ‘Make America great again,’ which is all about turning back the clock,” he says. “This now feels like a cautionary tale about what happens if you try to find a new foundation in tough times by turning back the pages. That can lead to bloodshed.”

True-crime narratives offer a formal structure to contain horror and grief, so Black decided to introduce a fictional protagonist—a Mormon detective (played by Andrew Garfield)—to comfort audiences. “I think [viewers] want to be scared, they want to be worried, they want to be trying to figure out: What’s in that cabin? What’s around the corner?” Black says. But in the end, they want a satisfying conclusion. “You can leave it behind and go back to your life—the genre isn’t like an ongoing waking nightmare.”

Whether the characters are made up or loosely based on real people, Cohen says, the emotions they provoke in us are real. She cites the “surveillance function” of media, which helps explain why we consume depressing and upsettingly graphic news, or in this case TV shows. “I don’t think that people watching true-crime things are literally thinking somebody might push them down a staircase,” she says, referencing the recent true-crime drama The Staircase. “But we need to be super aware of all the things that could potentially hurt us, and that’s what the true-crime genre is about: Look at this person and what happened to them.” There’s also, Cohen adds, an element of social comparison at play when we watch grim or apocalyptic TV: “If we’re feeling really bad about what’s going on in the world, we can always watch these things and say, ‘Well, it could be worse!’”

In fairness, these shows don’t just pummel us or leave us in perpetual darkness. Many interweave tenderness or redemption. When I reflect on my bleak binge-watches, mostly what lingers is the camaraderie among characters who are struggling. I think of Squid Game contestants forging friendships in the face of death; June joining with her fellow Handmaids to exact revenge against her abuser in The Handmaid’s Tale; the trauma-soaked Yellowjackets and Euphoria crews trying to help one another make it out of high school alive; the wives of fundamentalist Mormons in Under the Banner of Heaven helping one another escape familial violence; brain-wiped Severance colleagues caring for one another despite not knowing who they truly are; and survivors of Station Eleven working together to build a new world out of ruins. As Black says of audiences for dark shows like his: “Subconsciously, they’re like, I want to watch something that’s reflecting back to me what I’m feeling, and maybe it has an answer, maybe there’s hope. Or at the very least, I’m not alone in my anxieties.”

The crazy thing about Station Eleven is that Somerville originally pitched it as a drama about postapocalyptic joy. “The best audience for Station Eleven is people who are reckoning with the really scary feeling that the pandemic will never end, because I think the show is just surprisingly fun and almost makes a case for how you can do it—how you can live without life seeming worthless amidst a big hard thing that [may never] go away,” he says. “Even in the early moments of episode one, we’re trying to communicate to the audience: I know it’s bad, but there’s good stuff down this road. There’s warmth between people.”