Why Is My TV Saying It Hates Me?

Sometime last month, my TV started talking to me. And it's not good.

Hi,

Sometime last month, my TV started talking to me. To be specific, it started saying that it hated me.

I wasn’t sure when “I hate you” had first become emblazoned on my screen. I was half watching a TV show, glancing up from time to time to see what was going on. “I hate you” I read, before going back to being distracted by about 1000 horrific world events on my phone.

What made this more unusual is that I am not a subtitles guy. Normally when I watch something I try not to be distracted. My phone goes into flight mode, and I attempt to lose myself in whatever a team of people have spent hundreds of hours of time making.

While subtitles are an amazing, important tool for certain circumstances and people, I try to leave them off. Sometimes they spoil a moment coming up (a scare in a horror, or a punchline in a comedy) and I find myself reading more than absorbing. That’s just me.

But somehow, the subtitles “I hate you” had found its way onto my TV screen.

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I didn’t think much about it until I was watching a movie a few days later.

There it was. Those same three words stated directly to me as I watched a completely different thing. I turned subtitles on. I turned them off again. “I hate you” remained.

It’s funny how those three disconnected words started to affect my viewing experience. Disconnected from their origin (which I assumed was a character saying “I hate you”), my brain started to interpret the words as coming from my TV.

My TV hated me.

Sometimes when I turned my TV (bought at a sale, big and ungainly: The TV of a man living alone in his one bedroom apartment) off, it felt hot to the touch. Now it was pissed, pissed at me mercilessly making it play me “content” at all hours of the day and night.

I was reminded of a million pieces of pop culture that showed technology unexpectedly making contact, usually with some kind of horrific message.

The X-Files’ “Blood” episode (season two, episode three).

As the days rolled on, I noticed the words emblazoned on my screen were restricted to the Amazon Prime video streaming service.

From that point on, in my mind, the words became spoken by Jeff Bezos. The billionaire was up in space, circling the planet on his own private space rocket, laughing down at this piece of shit on earth.

It made sense. The rich despise those with less money than them — especially America’s rich. You didn’t work hard enough. You brought this on yourself. “I hate you” is exactly what they think as they step over bodies on the sidewalk.

The trouble was that I was watching a lot of Amazon Prime. And while reading “I hate you” for a few minutes starts off as a bit amusing, when that rolls into hours — and more hours — this weird thing happens: It starts to get to you.

You read those three words long enough, and they start to crawl under your skin. The fact is, they’re powerful words. My brain wandered, thinking about the people I’d met over my 40 or so years on earth that hated me. “Who has said those words to me?” I wondered. “Who is thinking that about me right now” was the next thought. “How many people might hate me by the time I die?”

You can play this game, too. Go on — try!

I hate you.

I hate you.

I hate you.

I hate you.

After a few weeks of this, I decided to look into what the fuck was going on.

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Pretty quickly, I found out that I was not alone in my problem. About a month ago, Hungry-Bunny-Lover had posed a question on Reddit: “Is anyone’s tv telling them that they hate them?”

You know how people talk about being seen? I felt seen.

my mother’s tv randomly had “I hate you” on it, and it stayed on it for awhile, like the whole movie. It had that on it when we don’t even have captions on so I don’t really know why it’s doing this.

Holy shit. This was me: “We don’t even have captions on”.

It’s a Samsung frame tv and we don’t know how to get rid of it because it won’t leave. PLEASE HELP!

My TV was a Samsung.

It hit me like a tonne of bricks. Maybe I’d been correct all alone — my TV was talking to me.

And I wasn’t alone.

But it wasn’t that simple.

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The other piece of this puzzle came together when I posted about my experience on Twitter.

Over a million people seemed to find my predicament amusing — many sharing other moments from pop culture that echoed my possible predicament:

The most low key passive aggressive version of The Ring. “I’m not coming out of the TV for you, but I want my feelings to be seen.”

Black mirror episode with this premise is imminent

Most of all, I found myself hoping against hope my life would not echo the events of Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream — or a host of horror fiction people pointed out to me:

Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

Stephen King’s cameo in Maximum Overdrive.

The Twilight Zone.

The Ring.

But then some very useful information started coming in, reminding me of one of the few positives of social media: crowdsourcing information from people’s lived experience.

“This happened to me watching YouTube!! On my phone!! At first I thought it was a weird thing a creator was doing, then it happened on multiple videos” offered one user, indicating that this problem was not limited to Samsung TV’s.

It was also clear that this was a worldwide phenomenon. And it all appeared to be triggered by one TV show: Amazon’s The Boys.

Users from all over the planet reported this problem beginning as they watched the recently released season of The Boys — the show I’d been half-watching as my problem started.

I reached out to affected people in the UK, America and New Zealand to figure out what was going on — eventually hitting on Ollie who had narrowed things down:

“My experience with this bug (and I’m calling it that because standard subtitles worked fine) seemed very similar to yours.

It happened consistently in the latest season and specifically whenever the character Kimiko was communicating in sign language. Much to our amusement, we also experienced the I hate you caption after her fight with an old friend.

Interesting that this caption also stuck even when it wasn’t Kimiko who said it.”

This made things make a bit more sense: The character of Kimiko is mute, so any lines of dialogue she signs are subtitled… even when the subtitles are turned off.

A photo I took of Kimiko and the line. As one user suggested Chi suggested: “Some of these pics would have gone platinum on tumblr”.

This at least explained why the subtitle was on in the first place. Why it stuck around — on The Boys and every other show I watched — remained a mystery.

Ollie went on:

“Is this intentional by the producers?

Subtitles are generally closed captions, optional subtitles and can be toggled on and off. As these were still an option when Kimiko signed, it felt like her captions were specific to her scenes. The only way we could get rid of them was to go out of the episode, back in, and press play. Not amazing user experience, but that’s not what Amazon is known for anyway... actually, what are they now known for?”

I’m a big fan of The Boys. In a very early Webworm I talked to actor Ant Starr (another New Zealander) about how his character “Homelander” echoed Donald Trump. In other words — it’s not completely inconceivable that the creators would throw a bug into the machine. An amazing, dark piece of viral marketing.

Last week, Homelander was giving nothing away — simply saying “Sorry mate” before laughing at me.

Erin Moriarty, who plays Starlight in the show, also seemed to enjoy my suffering —

— resharing my plight on her story (complete with a kind plug for Tickled):

By this point I had enquiries in with Samsung’s PR team, Amazon, and various people involved in the creation of The Boys.

Amazon is the only outlet that has engaged, perhaps concerned their “I hate you” messaging could reflect badly on them. The company slid into my DMs —

— offering me a special link to talk to Bezos in space. I obliged.

8 hours later I got a call, not from Jeff Bezos but from an Amazon worker apparently calling from Costa Rica.

“We received a report that you are seeing some profane words — is that correct?” they asked. I explained what was going on. I told them about my TV. I told them about Kimiko. I told them about my theory.

I heard them furiously typing notes as I ranted and raved; an unhinged man talking about how his TV was telling him it hated him. They promised they’d get back to me.

A followup email soon arrived, saying they were attempting to solve this mystery:

Fri, Aug 9, 5:34 PM

Hello David,

I’m Silvia with Amazon Tech Support Executive Customer Relations. I hope this email finds you well.

We’re currently working with our developers regarding your concern. When we receive further information, we'll contact you with an update. In the meantime, feel free to reply to this email with any questions or concerns you may have.

We'd also appreciate if you can let us know how we can contact you throughout the investigation. Our communication options are emails or phone calls. If you prefer to continue by phone, provide us with a phone number and your time preferences.

Thanks for your patience as we work to resolve this.

Best regards,

Silvia

Amazon.com

Right now I’m going back and forward with various members of the Amazon team (or quite possibly underpaid, nonunionised call center staff).

“Gabriella” has entered the discussion with a series of questions like, “What is the number of the episode and season displaying the error? What is the time stamp on the episode at which the issue occurs? What is the device used to stream the episode?”

At one point they ask for “a short video of the issue”— the first time Amazon has commissioned my documentary work.

“We appreciate your assistance. Thanks for choosing Amazon” they always say.

Three words keep bouncing around in my head.