"There is a new safe space for liberals in the age of President Trump: the television set." That's the (pretty funny, at least by New York Times standards) lede of "For Solace and Solidarity in the Trump Age, Liberals Turn the TV Back On." "Traditional television, a medium considered so last century, has watched audiences drift away for the better part of a decade," the Times adds. "Now rattled liberals are surging back, seeking catharsis, solidarity and relief."

Which makes perfect sense: The same way conservatives clung to Fox News during the Obama administration, liberals are flocking to shows that justify their anger and fears in the Trump administration. Even those of us who know that paying attention to only the news we want to hear is a simplistic, harmful coping mechanism are susceptible. I'm a sucker for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, but like any good liberal, I know a bunch of people who love Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers and who can't wait to share Alec Baldwin's Trump shtick. I even know one guy who's still watching The Daily Show for some reason.

In addition to serving as a launching pad for Oliver, Bee, Colbert, and more, Jon Stewart's The Daily Show—with its awkward blend of self-satisfied politics and softball celebrity interviews—is what kept a lot of liberals sane during the Bush years. But even in its heyday, there was a hollowness and cynicism to it: It was a traditional talk show that differentiated itself by telling liberals what they wanted to hear. Come for Stewart's smarm; leave before he makes small talk with Frankie Muniz.

To their credit, the best of the shows highlighted in yesterday's Times piece—namely, Oliver's and Bee's—have largely ditched The Daily Show's weird "Enough of the news, here's a celebrity trying to sell you some shit" segment. Instead, they dig deeper to find funnier, more interesting angles on the news. In their best moments, both Last Week Tonight and Full Frontal bolster their YouTube-friendly clips with stronger journalism than one can get from ostensibly more respected news services.

Both, though, still offer a strange kind of televised comfort food: Unlike the ugly jolt one gets each morning from reading the morning news, these shows offer outrage in safe, contained, predictable ways. Their comedy—however dark—makes their subject matter go down a little easier. There's something nice about watching them. They make you feel good. Delivered in easy, weekly, 30-minute chunks, they almost make the news seem manageable. I put on Last Week Tonight while eating dinner, or flip to YouTube when I've got a few minutes to kill to see what new clips there are from Full Frontal. ("Hold on just a second.") The stuff these shows are covering should upset me, but instead, I find myself comforted by the experience of watching them. Borg-like, I find myself heartened by the fact others are watching too. ("It’s reinforcing to watch," a viewer tells the Times of The Rachel Maddow Show. "It’s the same reason I marched in the women’s march: It’s because I believe in it, and I want to be surrounded by other people who believe in it, too.”)

For me, at least, much of these shows' comfort comes from having my own beliefs repeated and reinforced. That's... not great, and is exactly the sort of thing that made Trump voters susceptible to Trump. But there's another element to these shows too: There's something legitimately useful in consuming news (and, at their best moments, Oliver and Bee are news) that acknowledges the horrific ludicrousness of our current situation.

("Current situation" undersells the place we find ourselves in. Current... predicament? Current... catastrophe? Current... bugshit clusterfuck?)

Look, PBS NewsHour is reliable and smart as hell, and ideally, every American citizen would sit down and watch it every day. But—like the Times, like the Washington Post, like the BBC, like NPR—there's also something normalizing in the straight-faced way NewsHour offers up each day's soul-crushing developments: "Here's the news, and yep, we're in a bugshit clusterfuck, but we aren't going to come out and say we're in a bugshit clusterfuck." The shows liberals currently can't get enough of, on the other hand, are willing to explicitly point out that things are fucked up. Hell, pointing out that things are fucked up is their whole deal. Yes, there's a danger in hearing only the news we want to hear—but there's also a danger in refusing to acknowledge the ridiculousness of our bugshit clusterfuck.

“A journalist’s job is not to be balanced; it’s to be accurate," Gloria Steinem says in that Times piece. And for all these shows' flaws—and all the ways they tempt us to be lazier, more self-righteous, and falsely comforted—Steinem's quote gets to the core of their appeal. Sometimes it's good—sometimes its necessary—to know you aren't alone, and to see and hear someone else cut through the shit. So long as that's not the only way we get our news, we'll be fine.