Rachel Kurzius
Television trends have hustled in one direction: toward ever bigger and flatter screens with the highest possible resolution. Bonus points if the TV camouflages as a work of art when it isn’t streaming every piece of media known to humankind.
But now, a humble, boxy, tiny-screened TV dares to ask: What if we dust off a different path? What if we put the “tube” back in boob tube, and put that boob tube on the kitchen counter to watch a small collection of beloved movies on the built-in DVD or VHS player?
The return of the so-called kitchen TV speaks to a cozy aesthetic that valorizes 1990s/early 2000s nostalgia, a move away from open floor plans, and a hunger for retro tech and physical media.
“When I was little, it was like major, major goals,” says Ana Carver, who was born in the 1980s. “A lot of my friends had kitchen TVs, and I thought, ‘Man, when I’m a grown-up, I will have made it’” if she got her very own.
A few weeks ago, Carver finally found a squat, silver DVD-TV combo with an 8-inch screen on Facebook Marketplace near where she lives in Texas Hill Country.
“It makes me so happy,” Carver says. “It gives me all the cozy feels to have the TV going while I cook. I feel like I’m back in the ’90s, and that’s my favorite time ever.”
Her one regret? She got rid of the binder full of her childhood DVDs years back, so now she’s thrifting a new collection.
“There’s a definite resurgence in this nostalgic tech, products from the ’90s and early 2000s in particular, by a generation that seems to want that kind of a tactile experience, that old-school nostalgic look and feel,” says Paul Gagnon, a vice president at market analysis firm Circana who focuses on consumer technology. For many, it’s a return to items they loved long ago, but some younger people are finding them for the first time.
These cuboid TVs have a bonanza of sensory stimuli: the “thwump” sound they make when you turn them on; the press of the 3D buttons; the upchuck of an ejecting VHS or DVD; the subtle flicker of the screen; the way a VHS ribbon marks precisely how long you’ve watched and the need to physically rewind it.
After all, if the craze were simply about watching television in the kitchen, people could do that on newfangled refrigerator display screens.
Part of the lure, though, is that it harks back to a time when you could watch only what you had on hand. “Having a more curated selection and less choices is actually probably one of my favorite things about the kitchen TV,” says Rachel Dwyer. “We have too many choices today. A little bit of a limitation on your choices actually is really healthy.”
The Philadelphia resident already had a small television with a built-in VHS player sitting around unused when she saw the trend on social media. So she brought the machine into her kitchen, where she spends a lot of time cooking, meal prepping and cleaning. She’ll pop in a movie such as “Grease” or “The Jerk” - “nostalgic favorites that I’ve already seen a million times” - while she goes about her chores.
“It’s nice that even though this is a screen, I kind of cut down on the screen time that I'm spending on my computer and my tablet and my phone,” Dwyer says. “And to do something that feels a little more grounded and a little bit more analog.”
That’s the rich irony of the kitchen TV. Manufactured in a time filled with dire warnings that “television will rot your brain,” a small TV now seems downright quaint and even enriching compared with the addictive tyranny of smartphones and tablets.
Mary Banks, who lives in Los Angeles, is trying to make her kitchen a phone-free zone. Bringing in the big-backed, small-screened TV she had in her childhood bedroom, along with her VHS collection, helps her achieve that goal.
“I have been really surprised at how much I actually use it,” Banks says. “It’s become a part of my cooking routine to just have it going. … It’s just a small thing that is both boundary-setting and also comfort because of the nostalgia pieces.”
There’s also a hint at broader home design trends. Decades of open floor plan dominance meant that people could see the living room’s humongous screen from the kitchen.
“With the resurgence of people longing for closed floor plans, opting for closed floor plans when they’re looking for homes, even building new builds with now more closed-off floor plans, I think the kitchen TV just makes sense,” says Sara Parker, a Tennessee-based content creator who focuses on home design.
But there’s one thing that almost certainly isn’t coming back on a wide scale: the CRT (short for cathode-ray tube) television, which is the blocky-looking technology that flat-panel displays replaced. “The tubes aren’t made anymore,” says Gagnon.
Certainly, a person could simply buy a flat screen and put it in their kitchen, but the purest kitchen TV experience involves a hunt on the secondhand market or in a storage unit.
For Kyleigh Rose, who loves vintage shopping, that’s part of the appeal of the kitchen TV: It forces people to slow down from the moment they decide they want one.
“In our day and age, it’s like you want that two-day shipping, you want it on your doorstep the next day. And I had to be patient and I looked for a couple of months,” says Rose, who lives just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Be patient because the right one will come along and it’ll be perfect for your space.”