This essay situates developments in contemporary television in relation to the dominant social relations of time. It argues that time is a perpetual ‘problem’ for television, extending beyond the terms of configuring narrative formats and strategies of visual reflexivity, and instead indicating deeper epistemological and existential issues. While contemporary television programming often seems driven by a desire to give viewers the immediacy of a perpetual ‘now’, this creates a series of increasingly intense contradictions concerning the social experience of time and the functioning of memory.