Contrary to what the title may suggest, we are still getting good TV shows here and there. Just think of Succession, which ended earlier this year, or The Bear. But we are nowhere close to having as much amazing stuff to watch as we had during the 2000s and early 2010s.
During that period, we had The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Mad Men, The Wire, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Grey’s Anatomy, The Office, Parks and Recreation, House, Arrested Development, and Dexter among many more great shows.
Talking about all these shows makes one reminiscent. If you want a blast from the great old past and watch all these shows, Xfinity TV paired with Xfinity internet plan is the combo that you can trust for a lag-free great binge-watching experience.
However, with all of the shows behind us, many agree that the peak of television entertainment is over. Depending on where you look, you’ll get a different answer for when it ends. Some claim it was in 2015 when Mad Men aired its last episode. Others claim that it never really had a hard cutoff and instead just fizzled out as less and less great content was being produced. In this post, we are going to discuss what caused this unmistakable downfall.
Trough TV Era and Streaming Wars
Starting in the late 2010s and especially in the 2020s, people started considering us to be in what is called the “trough TV” era because the focus has shifted from quality to quantity. And this brings us to the rise of streaming and the streaming wars.
In hindsight, streaming is a huge factor in the downfall of the Golden Age. As more shows were being created by streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, viewers were getting more content than ever. And this content was being delivered to us in a completely different way.
Instead of having to wait for an episode to drop each week, we were getting entire seasons of shows coming out in one go. This led to binge-watching becoming a very common term in our vocabulary. It all started with Netflix. They realized that giving viewers more content at once would generate hype around their shows that would, in turn, drive more sign-ups to their service.
Streaming services rely on more and more viewers subscribing and sticking with them to be successful. So, they try to provide viewers with a ton of content, throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. This means writers have to pump out content like never before.
Change in Writing Practices
When creating Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan, along with his other writers, would sometimes spend weeks writing an episode and making sure it fits into the larger narrative to ensure the story was great and that the viewers were satisfied.
Compared to how writing rooms, especially those run by Netflix, operate today, this is now an urban legend. Today, writers are put into many rooms and have less time to write each episode. And since writers can’t keep up with the demands, we’re also getting more and more reality TV shows, or as some call it, trash TV.
Too Hot to Handle, Selling Sunset, and Love Is Blind are just some examples that come to mind. And these are some of the better examples. Netflix wants to fill the trough with as much content as possible so that viewers can just come for the pickings.
Budgetary Constraints
Because networks and streaming services are trying to pump out as much content as possible, the budgets are being reduced. Bloomberg reported that a TV director who was making $4 million a year is now earning about $750,000. That’s still pretty good money, but it’s an 81% drop, which is huge.
TV budgets have also dropped 30% on average, and streaming services are becoming hesitant to dish out good money for fresh television. We’ve already seen shows that have been getting canceled after a season or two because they weren’t massive hits right out of the gate, and the investment seemed too risky.
Premature Cancelling of Shows
It wasn’t always bad. Netflix was pretty great at one point. They were releasing amazing shows and were letting them find their footing instead of just canceling them after the first season. This brings us to another reason why the quality of TV has declined.
The Society, Everything Sucks, and The Get Down are just a few of the many shows that have been canceled way too early by Netflix alone. This is leading to a cycle where viewers are hesitant to watch new shows because they worry they’re going to get canceled anyway, which leads to fewer people watching some of these shows Netflix puts out, which keeps repeating.
Who knows if The Sopranos was made by Netflix today; it might have gotten canceled after the first season, considering it didn’t gain a huge following until seasons 2 and 3.
Writers’ Strike
Another big reason for the declining quality of TV was because of the 2007 to 2008 writer strike. Starting in November of 2007, The Writers Guild of America went on strike, where we saw 12,000 film and television screenwriters taking part.
They demanded increased DVD residuals, and new residuals from digital and on-demand media since there was a huge boom in this area during those years and some reality TV jurisdiction. This strike went on for 100 days and amassed huge losses for the industry. However, the real effects were being felt over the next few years.
The Bottom Line
With the rise of AI and just the nature of streaming itself, we’re not going to see the effects until a few years from now, maybe over the next decade or so. Studios and streaming services are starting to realize that the business model isn’t as good as they once thought.
We’ve been slowly returning to a more traditional form of TV releases, where instead of getting everything in one go, we maybe get one episode a week or just half a season. This is a good change, as it will help reduce the burnout people are starting to feel from TV.
