I’d argue TV is a side effect of the same thing that killed strong communities in the US, not the cause. Look at Europe, they all have TV’s and screens, plenty laying video games, but they still have active third spaces.

I think your comment on cars is more right. Americans “embraced” (thanks car companies for buying and killing our public transit) suburban sprawl through our embrace of cars. This meant we moved away from denser downtown areas where people could intermingle by chance and moved instead to splintered specialized places (thanks for having the way to our modern hell Edward Bassett). This got mixed with the American dream picket fence and lawn pushed by Monsanto post WWII and sprinkled with some casual racism and other issues to become a death spiral away from mixed use zoning and into large separate houses and plots of land. So life became “simple”. Home, grocery store, work.

You can’t just walk five minutes down the street anymore to a coffee shop or jazz club and find yourself rubbing elbows with people, and everyone driving cars to a dense social area just doesn’t work, if everyone tried to go to their city’s downtown the parking would just not support it. So we replaced this socializing with TV. A symptom sprouted from the root cause, not the cause itself.

There’s been a push to change zoning laws back to allowing mixed zoning which would directly improve this, but NIMBYs are out in force against it because it will lower the value of their home, which is a whole other related issue.