Here's a quote from the First Things blog by Carl Trueman, about our passion for entertainment:

For Augustine, the human obsession with entertainment in general was problematic.  He saw the need of people to be constantly entertained as a deceptive act of self-love, an attempt to flee the reality of our own mortality. That is why he lambasts the Roman exiles in Hippo who have fled Rome in the wake of Alaric’s attack and yet who persist in the desperate pursuit of theatrical entertainment (City of God 1:32). The theater was a means of distracting them from the real world with its real challenges and claims upon them. No doubt he would regard the modern affluent West, with its penchant for paying sports stars far more than nurses or doctors or carers, as a prime example of the way our need for distraction shapes the moral priorities of our economies.