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Cringe-filled entertainment can feel uncomfortable and still prompt useful reflection—but that is not the same as therapy. In a 2023 study of their own responses to Indian Matchmaking, researchers Anuja Pradhan and Carly Drake describe how reflecting on cringe may reveal self-compassion, empathy for others and awareness of personal limits. Their work offers an interpretive possibility, not evidence that watching cringe TV reliably improves mental health.
How discomfort might become reflective
Cringe is a mixed response: a viewer may feel someone else’s embarrassment while also finding the scene funny. That discomfort does not, by itself, mean the viewer is enjoying another person’s misfortune. What matters to the argument made by Pradhan and Drake is what happens after the reaction: introspection can turn an uncomfortable viewing moment into an opportunity to notice one’s own feelings and assumptions.
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In their article, “Netflix and cringe – affectively watching ‘uncomfortable’ TV,” published in Marketing Theory in 2023, Pradhan and Drake write: “Our findings reveal that engaging with media artefacts is a recursive process wherein consumers may encounter ‘cringe’, which when subject to introspection reveals unexpected socio-affective states like self-compassion, empathy for others, and understanding their own limitations as well as their place in the world.” Read the study in Marketing Theory.
Here, “therapeutic” is best understood in an everyday, reflective sense: a viewing experience may help someone think about how they respond to other people and to themselves. The study does not establish a clinical treatment effect or show that cringe viewing benefits every audience member.
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What the two shows illustrate—and what they do not
Indian Matchmaking: the subject of the study
Pradhan and Drake use collaborative autoethnography, analyzing their own reactions while watching Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking. Their account is situated and exploratory: it offers insight into the authors’ viewing and interpretation, not a controlled test, a measure of audience-wide effects or a clinical trial.
The authors also examine assumptions that may be rooted in Western values, drawing on de-Western feminist thought. That framing matters when viewers react to people and relationships shown on screen. Discomfort can be a prompt to examine one’s own cultural expectations, rather than a license to reduce a participant to an object of ridicule.
The Office: an example in a theory of cringe comedy
The Office plays a different role. Marc Hye-Knudsen discusses the series in a 2018 theoretical account of cringe comedy, arguing that it brings viewers close to socially awkward situations and can make embarrassment part of the comic experience. He proposes that audiences may take “benignly masochistic pleasure” in vicariously experiencing social worst-case scenarios. This is an explanation of how cringe comedy may work, not a clinical finding or part of the Indian Matchmaking study. Read Hye-Knudsen’s article record at Aarhus University.
Empathy is not the same as schadenfreude
A useful distinction is between schadenfreude—the pleasure someone takes in another person’s misfortune—and fremdscham, the empathic experience of embarrassment on another person’s behalf. A 2017 study examined these responses in an experimental context and reported differences in neural activity associated with the study’s focus and context. It included 34 participants; that figure describes the sample in that particular study, not a general estimate about viewers. The experiment did not test television viewing or whether watching cringe content is therapeutic. See the study record on PubMed.
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The distinction helps explain why one awkward scene can provoke different reactions—or a mixture of them. A viewer might feel for the person on screen, laugh at the situation, or notice an impulse to judge. The studies do not provide a universal formula for those responses; the context and the viewer’s interpretation matter.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Three questions to ask while watching
- What am I feeling? Notice whether the scene brings up shared embarrassment, amusement, pleasure at someone’s misfortune, or a combination.
- How close does the scene feel? Hye-Knudsen’s account suggests that cringe comedy can draw viewers into an awkward social moment. Consider whether the presentation feels safely comic or uncomfortably close.
- What assumptions am I bringing? In particular, ask whether your reaction is shaped by expectations about gender, culture or relationships, rather than treating those expectations as neutral.
These questions are ways to make sense of a viewing response, not a therapeutic exercise validated by the studies. The key possibility is modest: cringe can become reflective when a viewer examines the feeling instead of stopping at mockery or discomfort.
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What the evidence can—and cannot—support
- Supported as an interpretation: Pradhan and Drake’s analysis of their own viewing suggests that introspection around cringe may surface self-compassion, empathy and awareness of personal limitations.
- Not established: The work does not show that cringe entertainment treats a mental-health condition, produces lasting well-being gains, or affects viewers in a predictable way.
- A separate contribution: The 2017 study distinguishes empathic embarrassment from pleasure at misfortune, while Hye-Knudsen’s 2018 article offers a theory of why cringe comedy can be enjoyable. Neither is a test of therapeutic effects from watching a series.
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