I think it happened around Season 3 of “The Wire.” Maybe it was “The Sopranos.” “Curb Your Enthusiasm”? “Lost”? I can’t say. I just know I woke up one day confused.

Everyone, it seemed, had become a walking TV Guide: debating a bubbling vat of dramas and comedies, gossiping and blasting alerts about their pundit show bookings, filling out Which-character-are-you? quizzes. TV coverage had overtaken the media, where magazines, newspapers and websites dissected anticipated serial finales like D-Day.

It wasn’t the existence of new cult shows that left me befuddled, or even the tonnage of critical praise heaped on them. It was the hungry-hippo, remote-happy tone that continues to define this “golden age of TV.” Kill Your Television has morphed into Love Your Television. I find this transformation deeply disorienting, but not in an old-person, out-of-touch kind of way. Because watching TV is an activity I associate with retirement homes, it feels more like the world around me has prematurely aged.

For years I’ve dreaded writing this. There’s no way to do it without sounding like that stock villain of the postwar American dinner party, the tweedy bore and pretentious prick who makes a loud public show of not owning a TV. For the record, I’m not that guy. But it’s time to call bullshit on the new consensus that TV, in any of its Internet-age mutations, has become our harmless friend, deserving ever-greater amounts of our time and critical coverage limited to endless plot exegesis. It’s time to shout from our dish-cluttered rooftops what has been obvious for years: this celebration of TV’s new “golden age” is out of control. It’s dangerous, and it’s sad.

Not long ago, the culture, and especially the left, wrestled with television. It was accepted to represent a bit of a mass media riddle: neither easily dismissed, nor easily accepted. It was hard to imagine forcing change or even organizing modern society without utilizing and harnessing its power and reach. At the same time, it was understood, by its very nature, to be a potent conduit for saturation levels of corporate and state propaganda. It was thought to breed passivity and weaken the capacity for critical thought. These debates had been going for decades when they disappeared early in the new century. The rising sea of “must-see” TV drowned ideas that were part of the bedrock of the left’s heritage.

When I began hashing out a worldview as an adolescent in the late 1980s, initiation into this heritage meant reckoning with television. I’d watched my share of “Brady Bunch” reruns and “Silver Spoons,” ingesting millions of commercials along the way, and it took its toll. In my mid-teens I started to intuit TV was causing me problems, both with schoolwork and more generally with my ability to make sense of the world. When I eventually found my way to the then-standard critiques of television, it was revelatory. The arguments rested on multiple pillars: the political economy of the networks; the way that political economy leads to content designed to reinforce the status quo in often subtle but effective ways; the impact of advertising; the medium’s structural limitations and psychological effects; and, most important, how all of this interacted to shape the potential for mass organization and social and political change. It wasn’t called the Idiot Box just because “Hill Street Blues” wasn’t written as well as “The Wire,” or because there were no shows where Nation and Mother Jones writers could talk about their work.

You could trace the lineage of these critiques back to guys like Marx and Adorno (the first asshole to brag about not owning a TV) but it wasn’t necessary. There was no shortage of popular books that modernized and developed the old ideas about culture reflecting and reinforcing society’s underlying economic relations — books like Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” and Bill McKibben’s “Age of Missing Information,” to name a few. Less than a generation ago, the essence of these books could be found on ringed-binders, skateboards and first cars, distilled to that three-word battle cry, Kill Your Television, which captured a truth that has yet to be upended by TiVo, streaming, HBO or Chris Hayes. That truth, then as now, is this: Staring at images on a little screen — that are edited in ways that weaken the brain’s capacity for sustained and critical thought, that encourage passivity and continued viewing, that are controlled by a handful of publicly traded corporations, that have baked into them lots of extremely slick and manipulating advertising — is not the most productive or pleasurable way to spend your time, whether you’re interested in serious social change, or just want to have a calm, clear and rewarding relationship with the real world around you.

But wait, you say, you’re not just being a killjoy and a bore, you’re living in the past. Television in 2014 is not the same as television in 1984, or 1994. That’s true. Chomsky’s “propaganda model,” set out during cable’s late dawn in “Manufacturing Consent,” is due for an update. The rise of on-demand viewing and token progressive programming has complicated the picture. But only by a little. The old arguments were about structure, advertising, structure, ownership, and structure, more than they were about programming content, or what time of the day you watched it. Less has changed than remains the same. By all means, let’s revisit the old arguments. That is, if everyone isn’t busy binge-watching “House of Cards.”

It’s been something to watch, this televisionification of the left. Open a window on social media during prime time, and you’ll find young journalists talking about TV under Twitter avatars of themselves in MSNBC makeup. Fifteen years ago, these people might have attended media reform congresses discussing how corporate TV pacifies and controls people, and how those facts flow from the nature of the medium. Today, they’re more likely to status-update themselves on their favorite corporate cable channel, as if this were something to brag about.