After waking up each morning and lying in bed, looking at my phone for way too long, I’ll finally gather the courage to get up. I’ll reach over to my bedside table and pick up the light remote (1), sliding the lights on, then changing the color from magenta to white and turning it up to maximum brightness. 

I’ll go downstairs, grab the universal remote for the living room TV (2) and turn on First Take while I drink coffee. I’ll head back upstairs to my office and wake up my laptop using my Bluetooth trackpad (3). I’ll play Wordle, entering each guess with my Bluetooth keyboard (4), and then it’s time to shower, get dressed, and get out of the house. 

I live in the suburbs, so if I want to go anywhere, that means driving, which means pressing the button on my keychain to unlock my car (5). I’ll run errands, return home, and bring the groceries in through the garage. To open it, I use the remote (6) that lives in my glove box. I’ll put everything away, eat some lunch, procrastinate, work, and procrastinate some more. When I’ve given up on work for the day, I’ll go into my bedroom and turn on the TV (7) and watch something on the Game Show Network while I straighten my hair. Whenever my fiancé is done with his work, we’ll convene downstairs, turn on the TV, and then press the PlayStation button in the center of the controller (8) and proceed, as of late, to play several hours of Ghost of Tsushima.

The story of my everyday life can be told through all the remote controls I use. In theory, the sheer number of these little devices that I interact with on a daily basis seems inefficient, even overwhelming. But I’ve found that using separate remotes that each have a distinct purpose and do not overlap with one another helps me remember the pleasure of living in a high-tech era.

For many years now, the touchscreen has reigned supreme. Life in 2023 involves relentless use of various technology, interfaces, and screens, all ostensibly meant to make things easier for you. But for me, they fail more often than they succeed. There is, for example, no way the self-checkout at the supermarket simplifies the process of buying groceries. Why would my gym give me something as easy and simple as a plastic membership card when they can force me to download a shitty app instead? And while I know some people like their voice assistants, I find the ominous presence of Alexa, Siri, and the nameless Google Assistant creepy, invasive, and more effort than they’re worth.

The touchscreen on my iPhone is full of infinite possibilities — maybe it will pull me into a primo Wikipedia wormhole, but it also runs the risk of sucking me into a corner of Twitter where people are being horrible to one another. There are so many variables. Meanwhile, all my gorgeous little remote controls are single-purpose. When I use them, I know exactly what is going to happen, and because of that, they are able to reliably and authentically inspire joy in my stupid 21st-century existence. When I pick up my light remote and change the vibe of the room from cyan to magenta, I feel legitimately grateful to be alive today, in an age where I can seamlessly change the vibe in my house by using a little device to alter the color and brightness of the lights. My ancestors could never.

There are the remotes I love, not because of the device itself but because of the meaning behind it. I find using my garage remote and car keys (actually a remote) totally delightful because it makes me feel like a real suburban adult, like I saw in the movies when I was growing up in Manhattan. When I was a kid, I never envisioned that my future would include a house with a backyard, the sort of normie existence that involves observing trash day every Monday and driving into the city on the weekends. Each time I click the button to unlock my car and hear that little beep, I think about how I really like the life I’ve built for myself, that things don’t always end up the way you planned, which is a good thing.

My downstairs TV remote has the most emotional significance to me of the lot. It’s the end result of one of my fiancé’s Rube Goldbergian projects, wherein he set out to condense the television remote, the Roku remote, and the HDMI switcher into one remote — a task I told him was totally unnecessary since I obviously don’t mind having a lot of different remotes. Nevertheless, he is a certified tinkerer, committed to taking on this absurdly complicated scheme to turn three remotes into one, which involved purchasing another universal remote that he integrated into the one we currently use. Sometimes when I pick up the remote, I’m like, “Damn, I really love this guy.”

(For the sake of transparency, I must tell you that my remotes don’t always inspire contentment — for example, I loathe the remote for the TCL Roku TV in my bedroom, which is unreliable and always pathetically begging me to try out using voice commands.)

I spend a lot of time thinking about how annoying and life-consuming technology can be. But the relationships I’ve developed with my remote controls remind me of the upside of living in this age of infinite devices. The world can feel scary and alienating and overwhelming. I know that everything is going to be just fine as long as I face it head-on, enlightened like a thousand-armed Buddhist statue, each hand clutching a different remote control.

When ESPN canceled Playmakers, a critically acclaimed and popular drama about the lives of professional football that ran for a single season in 2003, they were pretty transparent about why: it had pissed off the NFL. “It’s our opinion that we’re not in the business of antagonizing our partner, even though we’ve done it, and continued to carry it over the NFL’s objections,” said Mark Shapiro, the then executive vice president of ESPN. “To bring it back would be rubbing it in our partner’s face.”

At the time, Playmakers was the highest-rated program on ESPN, outside of actual Saturday and Sunday primetime football games. Now, almost 20 years later, Playmakers is hard to come by. You can buy it on DVD and probably download it using not-so-legal means, but it is streaming nowhere. “It was just, like, wiped out of existence,” co-executive producer Michael Angeli told me. “It’s conspicuous in its absence.”

It’s unfortunate that the show has been buried under the rug because it’s a powerful and gritty examination of professional football, and it holds up nearly two decades later. Playmakers details the lives of athletes on the fictional Cougars. A harsh and realistic characterization of pro football, the pilot opens with middle linebacker Eric Olczyk feeling enormous guilt about accidentally paralyzing a member of the opposing team. We later meet rookie running back Demetrius Harris, who is addicted to crack and other drugs; the team’s extremely unlikeable owner, who does everything he can to help Harris hide his drug use and involvement in violent crimes from the league; and a veteran back trying to become a starter again, even if it means taking performance-enhancing drugs.

So it’s not particularly surprising that the NFL wasn’t too keen on a show that focused on the darker side of their sport. At the time, commissioner Paul Tagliabue said Playmakers was “one-dimensional and traded in racial stereotypes” and a “gross mischaracterization of our sport.” But the show was nevertheless positively received by NFL players and critics alike. The New York Times called Playmakers “well written and well acted… professional football as observed by Joan Didion rather than John Madden.” Deion Sanders reportedly thought it was a realistic portrait of the NFL, and the show’s creator John Eisendrath said that he heard that “there were a lot of players who loved it.” He remembered that when it was on the air, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was “outspoken and supportive of it.”

“I had no expectation that it would be controversial,” Eisendrath told me. “I was clearly naive.” He said that he wrote the show because he wanted to explore male relationships and thought sports would provide good “scaffolding” to talk about the emotional lives of men.

“I imagined what the individual players are afraid of, and what in their individual lives scared them the most, and built the whole thing based on the emotion of fear,” he said. “I think that is a huge component of sports: the fear of being hurt, the fear of hurting someone, the fear of failure, the fear of being replaced.”

Consulting producer Charles Holland told me he was disappointed when he learned it got canceled because he loved writing for the show, but your show getting canceled is just part of the reality of working in Hollywood. “The late Steven Bochco once told me that every single show you ever do is going to be canceled. It’s just a question of when,” he said.

Despite the show’s popularity, no other network picked it up. “We tried to sell it somewhere else,” Angeli said. “No one wanted to touch it. I’m sure it was because the NFL exerted pressure on everybody.”

For the past decade, we’ve been having more frank conversations about the realities of the NFL: the effects of CTE, the pervasiveness of domestic abuse, the league silencing the protests of its players, and most recently, its racist hiring practices. In many ways, Playmakers was dramatizing many of these things before they’d become widely known. “It’s the best product made about football, and I think we definitely suffered from being ahead of our time,” Holland said.

I suggested to Eisendrath that perhaps it could’ve been picked up by a streamer like Netflix had it been on the air 10 years later. After all, Friday Night Lights, another football series, was saved by DirecTV after getting dropped by NBC.

“No fucking way,” he replied. It’s why no show has approached the world of professional sports with the same brutal honesty since Playmakers aired. While Friday Night Lights wrestled with injury, race, and class, it was contained to high school football and didn’t take shots at the NFL. Today, the league’s TV rights are among the most competitive among networks and streaming platforms — the next decade worth over $100 billion. 

“More so today than ever, the most powerful among the most powerful people in Hollywood are the heads of the commissioners of major league sports. The reason they’re so powerful is because sports is the sole remaining juggernaut of live TV ratings,” Eisendrath said. “And that is why there hasn’t been a single show like Playmakers that has come on since. You can dramatize any occupation in America: doctors, lawyers, cops. You can show them doing anything. You can show the president getting a blowjob in the White House. But you cannot touch the world of major league sports.”