Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn’t change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house.

Hitchcock’s quip treats television not as a moral revolution but as a domestic technology that reorganizes where life happens. Like indoor plumbing, TV doesn’t fundamentally alter human desires—curiosity, gossip, entertainment, distraction—but it relocates their satisfaction from public spaces (theater, street, neighbors) to the private home. The joke also carries a faintly sardonic edge: television’s power lies less in transforming character than in encouraging passivity and enclosure, making people easier to keep at home and, by implication, easier to program. It’s a compact critique of modern media as convenience that subtly reshapes social life.