Every election year I revisit The West Wing (yes, even the flimsy 5th season post Sorkin). I’m about to rewatch it.
But I came here to say that, like social media, television — or whatever we’re calling it now — became specialized. There’s a Cat Fancy for everyone. If you like apocalyptic mutant zombie infant deathmatches…there’s a show for that. And, no, you don’t have to watch it. Though, in that same breath, we used to think good writing/tv/film rises above and becomes part of the zeitgeist. But that wave doesn’t exist as more than an echo for a small subset of people anymore. Such is getting what we always wished for: everything.
I think this argument about specializiation -- something for everyone -- has contributed to the problem. I don't want an AI-driven film just for me. I want a film for all of my friends and me to share together. Those memories are as important as the film. The alternative is toxic, in my mind.
We, the viewing audience, have been subject to this specializing since the beginning of film (theatre before that) because there’s money to be made. Oh, and we happen to like them. Just take the last 50 years of film: Rosemary’s Baby/Night of the Living dead prove a box office draw & $ for horror = we get the 70’s-80s horror films. Star Wars makes franchises (and space movies) popular. John Hughes teen movies in the 80s-90s. Found footage movies in the mid-90s. Superhero movies in the 2000s.
Specialization isn’t the issue, IMHO. But you’re right about the shared memory of watching a film together. I miss that the most. And quoting Office Space with new people who haven’t seen it.
Great article. This brought to mind something a neuroscientist just spoke about on an episode of The Armchair Expert. He had grown up in tumultuous circumstances and said that as a result he lacked a foundational sense of security that comes with knowing your environment and the people around you will remain predictable. It's a form of PTSD.
I couldn't agree with you more on the impulse to pull away from the growing din of content and information. As a professional actor and budding writer/director, I sometimes question if throwing myself further into the mouth of content and media is what's really good for me. It's an inner debate I keep having, keep checking in with. My instinct to be a filmmaker is for now winning out...but we'll see...
I think we're all living through a kind of collective PTSD, desperate for any kind of anchor to something stable and familiar. I don't know if it exists anymore. As for struggling with what's right for you re: content/information/filmmaking, I experience something similar. I just don't know who I am without it. There isn't another option for me. I'd probably suffer more if I tried to change my life at this point.
I said this exact thing to my husband while we were out on a walk this morning; it’s easy to romanticize another version of my life away from filmmaking and constant hustle, but I suspect that the reality of that would be too painful. A divorce in which I’d come out the loser.
Tempted to adopt a 6-month policy on content! Good strategy.
I heard once that even at the beginning of the last century it was possible to know all math. You could start studying as a child, and by the time you were a professor, say, you could have learned everything that was known about math at that time. Not so any longer. Even if you spent your entire life studying nothing but math, you most likely couldn't learn it all. The guy who told me this said flat out that you couldn't. I feel the need to hedge.
One of the saving graces for me in approaching the flood of TV is that most of it is bad. I don't need to spend my time on bad TV. But this loneliness you mention is profound, with this as my criteria. Most Americans seem perfectly happy to consume what I consider to be really boring, poorly written, poorly acted TV. It speaks to them in a way they understand. Which is kind of terrifying to me. Shows like All in the Family used to appeal to everyone, and they lifted everyone up. Now you can spend hours every day consuming shows that ask nothing of you at all, in the way of growth.
To which I have to say, "Oh well," or I would go crazy.
As a mathematician, I can confirm that knowing all the math now is impossible. Partly it's due to having so many more mathematicians now than in the past and that we can build on the work of our predecessors.
It is a slight exaggeration to say that at the beginning of the last century someone could know all the math, but there were people well versed on many areas of math (Poincare is an example). If you go further in the past, then you have people like Euler or Gauss whose mathematical output was incredibly diverse and created many new mathematical fields. We still have mathematicians that work in multiple fields but it's impossible to be an expert in all of them.
My family and I watched the entire six seasons of COMMUNITY during lockdown and loved it, loved it, and I didn't know anything about the show when it first aired - but it may be my favorite sitcom ever.
I do remember when SEINFIELD was on in the 90s, the next day everyone would be talking about it.
As an animation historian, I have seen these happen with television animation production. It went from Saturday morning at three networks plus syndication in the 1980s to a massive amount of cable production in the 1990s and 2000s, to the advent of streaming in the late 2010s. In all that time some of the most brilliant programming ever made in the genre was living cheek-by-jowl with some of the greatest dreck, and it was easy to see which ones merited discussion and what did not.
Unfortunately for this genre, streaming protocol and the preference among studios for investment in resurrecting old IP to the continued to development of original ideas have disrupted creative and technological innovation in the field. And the struggle to find good programming has become worse (not to mention having to pay for it!).
Finding great TV feels impossible today without tremendous time risk. I'm 47. I don't want to sit around watching ten hours of something that, A, doesn't excite me as much as rewatching "ER" would and, B, I'm the only one watching anyway. There are so many TV series I'd write about here, but I know nobody would read the pieces out of ignorance of the subject matter.
Another thoughtful, thought provoking, and engaging piece. I couldn't agree with you more and certainly couldn't articulate it any more clearly or persuasively. Excellent article.
And your comment about looking forward to watching Friends with your wife, holds true in my home as well. Only for us it is the Office, or at least the first few seasons of it. And also Seinfeld. And hell, if I am being honest, my wife and I are somewhat addicted to Murder She Wrote, a show neither of us would have watched in the 90s but now, is there anything more soothing than Jessica Fletcher solving crime episode after episode after episode. Haha. I kid. Sort of. Haha.
Anyway, excellent analysis. Thanks for taking the time to write it. And for sharing it.
I've contemplated returning to many TV series like "Murder She Wrote". I think it's probably the small-screen equivalent of lighting up a joint every night, really. Why not? Why must we judge ourselves for wanting a pop-culture hit that contemporary pop-culture has washed its hands of providing us?
I’ve been mulling on this all day. I really miss the days of scheduled TV when what you watched tended to be governed by when you were at home and viewing was the sort of communal family experience that you describe. I find myself watching far less TV now because it is available any time so it is easier to put off. I tend to ignore hype and just look for something when the mood takes me. What I will say though, is that articles of yours that I’ve read have pointed me in the direction of shows that I’ve really enjoyed. I’m thinking of Ted Lasso and most recently Home Before Dark (which I have not quite finished). I agree that that sense of zeitgeist which we used to have is no longer there but I would be more than happy for you to occasionally direct me through the maze of mediocrity to find something worth watching, providing I guess that you can find it yourself!
I'm glad I've helped lead you to anything you've found worthwhile. I certainly don't think good TV isn't being made. There is, surrounded by a lot of shit you have to wade through to find it. And even the shit isn't necessarily bad. It's just...not great. And there's too much of it. So somehow, everything is diluted because of it. I want to watch TV everyone around me is watching at the same time. Live TV, which dominated until about 2013, was key to that.
I agree with this although there has always been plenty of bad TV out there (although I take your point about quantity generally) and what I tend to find is that I am signposted to the good stuff through my friends, and sometimes I do the signposting too. That way I do have people to discuss it with so I don’t always feel I’m watching alone.
For me in Brooklyn in the 90’s it was definitely Martin. We all watched. It was easy to find. Easy to get into. Sure I was going on and on about Homicide. But Martin was the show we all watched. I loved ER & NYPD Blue. We had as I say about hip hop-back then balance (I had De La Soul and Wu Tang with Snopp and Dre, Outkast and the Roots all in one 74 minute CD! Now that’s balance).
Interestingly I just finished Is Not Tv it’s HBO book. And like everything in this industry what got called prestige tv was never meant to be. In the end The Wire and Sopranos were made and shot like old tv. All HBO did to be honest was let them curse, show nudity and deal with things that need more than a one word reply.
They were made by people who were tv people. Through and through. They now had “their shot”. They knew where not to go. They knew what they could get away with. They weren’t trying to make prestige shows.
David Simon just wanted to add a small twist to the cop procedural. David Chase had this idea of reviving the gangster genre but wanted an edge.
Given his background and he was seeing a psychiatrist he thought why not have this gangster secretly see a doctor because his mothers is driving him up a wall? Simon-what is the drug war really about? That sentence don’t seem prestigey to me, lol!
See that? Small twists. On an ongoing thing-shows about work or procedurals.
I don’t know what Amazon was doing with “Citadel” or the 21st century iteration of HBO (was that an HBO Max joint and if so who cares?) with “The Idol”.
There’s always been a parallel between shows like the Wire and Mad Men and “conscious” rappers. The ones that kick “real rhymes” but sales don’t match. Nas debut well known in hip hop circles as perhaps the best debut of a rapper ever. Things sold like 30,000 units in a still public buying music era.
I’ve felt most of the fans only went back a few years after the debut and then listened to it but that’s another story.
It’s hard to create any art. But to actually think you can create a classic is silly. But the streamers tried to create tv versions of “Illmatic”.
And what did we get? Ironically we did get a few classics. Some good cuts were made. But like Nas debut. They went nowhere.
Now I can and have killed all hip hop fans for their ridiculously mishap of not buying the album of your life when it debuted due to youthful arrogance.
With these tv shows though I don’t care if everything is an Illmatic it’s impossible to see them all. The Wire on basic cable barely drew flies. But it wasn’t as hard to find it back then.
Smartly HBO let it live perhaps knowing over time people would subscribe or buy the disc set. Either way the show got scene and people got paid.
Cut to the last ten years and it’s been a mess. The number one streamer got there by lying about EVERYTHING. Got the whole industry gassed to follow their lead now for them to only go back to what cable networks were running away from.
The mistake in all of this was the CEOs ignoring the new tech, meanwhile once it hit they then tried to retroactively upgrade everything at the same time.
Early on HBO could’ve brought Netflix but was spooked by the TW/AOL debacle.
When netflix switched to streaming while still doing dvd rentals, no one seemed to think-hey what’s the legacy for these physical products? What about our library?
Nope instead the studios just let dvds go picked apart their libraries for netflixs pleasure.
A decade later they found themselves in a race they couldn’t win. What it really comes down to was the studios got use to the old way of making money. And like when cable first started streaming was not a threat and more of a joke.
The similarities to how Hollywood treated both cable and steaming when they entered the business is similar.
What help cable got was cast offs and first timers. The programming was minor league at best. And they were laughed at by the establishment. But by 89 a decade or so in -HBO was the one doing the laughing. (Jumped on a product the networks had but slept on -boxing. Use to be free on ABC but then HBO did a netflix. Then Mike Tyson fell into HBO’s lap and the rest is history).
Nowadays it’s a mess. I just canceled fubo because they ditched the Mets network SNY. Shopped around and had to go back to DirecTV for the same price.
If you add that bill and the other services plus my isp bill it’s no question $150+ more than my last cablevision bill in 2011. And here you got the Bourne franchise on two different streamers at the same time. You would’ve never saw that with HBO and Showtime in the 90’s.
I love all of this, from the reference to "MARTIN" -- which was a staple for my friends and I in Detroit while I was straddling high school graduation -- to ILLMATIC, to what made early "Peak TV" so goddamn good. I can't respond to all of this, but if you haven't read my interview with Carly Wray from this past week, you might find it interesting. She worked with a lot of these TV greats who learned what they were doing from TV pre-Peak and she's very articulate about some of the points you're making here. https://colehaddon.substack.com/p/q-and-a-screenwriter-carly-wray-on
I was out in the world with other people who also did not own TVs back then. So not only had I never watched 'Friends', I'd also never seen 'The Wire'. By 2007, I decided I should see some of these things.... The summer James Gandolfini died, I binged The Sopranos, and started watching Mad Men, which I loved, ditto for Breaking Bad, and, grudgingly, GoT.
THEN I found myself in that spiral of more-and-more-shows -to-watch thing you're talking about. And yes, my lifestyle had changed a lot. I was back to watching massive amounts of TV, like when I was a child. It cut into my writing time, and yes, I was depressed. It was horrible. I had to do a complete reset of everything to get out of that.
As Ted Gioia said last week, the name of the game is distraction now, not entertainment.
Streaming platforms are too successful, yet writers are still being abused, hard, and .even the biggest platforms are losing money and subscribers. So yes, too much of a good thing has a terrible flattening effect on its appeal and maintaining quality is much harder.
Agree with so many of your points here. I'm going to watch the Scorsese commercial later when my kids are off to school - I've been looking forward to it!
Struck by your insight that too much information is depressing us. Been really feeling this lately and pulling back from social media. Particularly now that so much of it is flooded with AI generated nonsense or staged clout chasing garbage. Grateful for your newsletter so I can read something that provokes creative thinking without having to wade into the muck!
I’m a little gobsmacked by synchronicity reading this, as I was just journaling this morning about content proliferation and information overload as a modern Tower of Babel rendering humanity-at-large incapable of productive discourse and collective action. 🤯
Did you mention the water cooler? Offices used to have water cooler moments. TV writers used to aim for the water cooler moment. Do people still have water coolers? Do people still have offices? I too never saw Friends. Or The West Wing. I committed to West Wing recently, loved it and the characters, looked forward to it for both education and entertainment, and am astounded to report meeting several people who have watched the entire shebang 3 times each. Streaming does not come with a water cooler. A retired tv exec predicts live to air will be used primarily for live sport events, watched together with other devices playing games or music ... I ask you then, is it possible Sustack is the new water cooler? You may have given us our first moment.
I think TV is in a rapid state of evolution and we're probably going to see "live TV" return in some form of another besides sports, but we'll see. I didn't use the term "water cooler" myself, but it's basically what I'm discussing. Whether in your high school class room or at work or at the bar with your friends, TV and film used to be something we could talk about TOGETHER.
This was moving - and I never thought about the correlation of not having things to connect on in this way. I do want to ask - we are definitely in the decline of macro-culture, but it does seem to be making the space for the rise of micro-culture which could be a good thing! The worry I see in us “going back” to where everyone is watching the same few shows - is how many FEWER opportunities that means for artists, whether it’s directors, actors, writers, crew, etc.
The thing is, there were too many people employed during peak TV. It was unsustainable, and that's why production has crashed. So, I wonder which is worse: convincing people they have a future in an industry, letting them invest their lives in it, and then casting them off *or* having fewer jobs. Because at the end of the day, fewer showers didn't mean that many fewer writers, statistically speaking. A season of "ER" required a massive room, some of these shows had up to twenty. During peak TV, an eight-episode season might have five or six and the room only runs four or five months, maybe six, instead of almost a full year. So, writers have to scrabble to get a second job, so they're then spending twice as much time pursuing work as they previously did...with the added bonus that the show they *were* on has a very limited chance of returning, whereas you knew you were coming back for the next season of "MATLOCK". Jobs are irrelevant if you can't build a life and have a family with them. They're not just there to satisfy artistic ambitions. If people wanted to do that with that level of anxiety, they could just pursue indie film in between their regular jobs - which used to be a normal thing people did to be both an artist and secure their futures. I'm rambling a bit, but my point, at the end of this, is they used to make A LOT more films and the TV that was made provided a lot more SECURITY. On top of that, development was more robust, so there were more jobs in between the ones on go movies and shows. If you asked me which market I'd prefer to work in, I'd take the one that died, not the one that existed five years ago.
Is there a way in which this becomes a good thing in combining the connection of the old with finding others (online but then transferred to IRL experiences) but in a more niche way?
I have hundreds of photos of my grandparents spending every waking minute of their lives partying with large groups of people, attending concerts, dancing, and otherwise living a life I yearn for.
Gosh, this. I'm trying to remember the last TV-series I was really fond of. LOST? Maybe the first season of Walking Dead? After that I stopped watching 'new' TV shows. Wait, correction -- my husband and I follow that Oak Island show on History Channel. It brings us joy to follow the Lagina brothers. We did watch Downton Abbey when it ran. Now? We watch Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Highly recommend it. Bette Davis and Clark Gable and the gang!
I left the US in 2017 and, with it, I lost TCM. I miss TCM more than I miss a single other thing in the US...with the exception of perhaps autumn, apple cider, and Halloween.
Every election year I revisit The West Wing (yes, even the flimsy 5th season post Sorkin). I’m about to rewatch it.
But I came here to say that, like social media, television — or whatever we’re calling it now — became specialized. There’s a Cat Fancy for everyone. If you like apocalyptic mutant zombie infant deathmatches…there’s a show for that. And, no, you don’t have to watch it. Though, in that same breath, we used to think good writing/tv/film rises above and becomes part of the zeitgeist. But that wave doesn’t exist as more than an echo for a small subset of people anymore. Such is getting what we always wished for: everything.
I think this argument about specializiation -- something for everyone -- has contributed to the problem. I don't want an AI-driven film just for me. I want a film for all of my friends and me to share together. Those memories are as important as the film. The alternative is toxic, in my mind.
We, the viewing audience, have been subject to this specializing since the beginning of film (theatre before that) because there’s money to be made. Oh, and we happen to like them. Just take the last 50 years of film: Rosemary’s Baby/Night of the Living dead prove a box office draw & $ for horror = we get the 70’s-80s horror films. Star Wars makes franchises (and space movies) popular. John Hughes teen movies in the 80s-90s. Found footage movies in the mid-90s. Superhero movies in the 2000s.
Specialization isn’t the issue, IMHO. But you’re right about the shared memory of watching a film together. I miss that the most. And quoting Office Space with new people who haven’t seen it.
Great article. This brought to mind something a neuroscientist just spoke about on an episode of The Armchair Expert. He had grown up in tumultuous circumstances and said that as a result he lacked a foundational sense of security that comes with knowing your environment and the people around you will remain predictable. It's a form of PTSD.
I couldn't agree with you more on the impulse to pull away from the growing din of content and information. As a professional actor and budding writer/director, I sometimes question if throwing myself further into the mouth of content and media is what's really good for me. It's an inner debate I keep having, keep checking in with. My instinct to be a filmmaker is for now winning out...but we'll see...
I think we're all living through a kind of collective PTSD, desperate for any kind of anchor to something stable and familiar. I don't know if it exists anymore. As for struggling with what's right for you re: content/information/filmmaking, I experience something similar. I just don't know who I am without it. There isn't another option for me. I'd probably suffer more if I tried to change my life at this point.
I said this exact thing to my husband while we were out on a walk this morning; it’s easy to romanticize another version of my life away from filmmaking and constant hustle, but I suspect that the reality of that would be too painful. A divorce in which I’d come out the loser.
Tempted to adopt a 6-month policy on content! Good strategy.
I heard once that even at the beginning of the last century it was possible to know all math. You could start studying as a child, and by the time you were a professor, say, you could have learned everything that was known about math at that time. Not so any longer. Even if you spent your entire life studying nothing but math, you most likely couldn't learn it all. The guy who told me this said flat out that you couldn't. I feel the need to hedge.
One of the saving graces for me in approaching the flood of TV is that most of it is bad. I don't need to spend my time on bad TV. But this loneliness you mention is profound, with this as my criteria. Most Americans seem perfectly happy to consume what I consider to be really boring, poorly written, poorly acted TV. It speaks to them in a way they understand. Which is kind of terrifying to me. Shows like All in the Family used to appeal to everyone, and they lifted everyone up. Now you can spend hours every day consuming shows that ask nothing of you at all, in the way of growth.
To which I have to say, "Oh well," or I would go crazy.
As a mathematician, I can confirm that knowing all the math now is impossible. Partly it's due to having so many more mathematicians now than in the past and that we can build on the work of our predecessors.
It is a slight exaggeration to say that at the beginning of the last century someone could know all the math, but there were people well versed on many areas of math (Poincare is an example). If you go further in the past, then you have people like Euler or Gauss whose mathematical output was incredibly diverse and created many new mathematical fields. We still have mathematicians that work in multiple fields but it's impossible to be an expert in all of them.
My family and I watched the entire six seasons of COMMUNITY during lockdown and loved it, loved it, and I didn't know anything about the show when it first aired - but it may be my favorite sitcom ever.
I do remember when SEINFIELD was on in the 90s, the next day everyone would be talking about it.
As an animation historian, I have seen these happen with television animation production. It went from Saturday morning at three networks plus syndication in the 1980s to a massive amount of cable production in the 1990s and 2000s, to the advent of streaming in the late 2010s. In all that time some of the most brilliant programming ever made in the genre was living cheek-by-jowl with some of the greatest dreck, and it was easy to see which ones merited discussion and what did not.
Unfortunately for this genre, streaming protocol and the preference among studios for investment in resurrecting old IP to the continued to development of original ideas have disrupted creative and technological innovation in the field. And the struggle to find good programming has become worse (not to mention having to pay for it!).
Finding great TV feels impossible today without tremendous time risk. I'm 47. I don't want to sit around watching ten hours of something that, A, doesn't excite me as much as rewatching "ER" would and, B, I'm the only one watching anyway. There are so many TV series I'd write about here, but I know nobody would read the pieces out of ignorance of the subject matter.
Another thoughtful, thought provoking, and engaging piece. I couldn't agree with you more and certainly couldn't articulate it any more clearly or persuasively. Excellent article.
And your comment about looking forward to watching Friends with your wife, holds true in my home as well. Only for us it is the Office, or at least the first few seasons of it. And also Seinfeld. And hell, if I am being honest, my wife and I are somewhat addicted to Murder She Wrote, a show neither of us would have watched in the 90s but now, is there anything more soothing than Jessica Fletcher solving crime episode after episode after episode. Haha. I kid. Sort of. Haha.
Anyway, excellent analysis. Thanks for taking the time to write it. And for sharing it.
I've contemplated returning to many TV series like "Murder She Wrote". I think it's probably the small-screen equivalent of lighting up a joint every night, really. Why not? Why must we judge ourselves for wanting a pop-culture hit that contemporary pop-culture has washed its hands of providing us?
I’ve been mulling on this all day. I really miss the days of scheduled TV when what you watched tended to be governed by when you were at home and viewing was the sort of communal family experience that you describe. I find myself watching far less TV now because it is available any time so it is easier to put off. I tend to ignore hype and just look for something when the mood takes me. What I will say though, is that articles of yours that I’ve read have pointed me in the direction of shows that I’ve really enjoyed. I’m thinking of Ted Lasso and most recently Home Before Dark (which I have not quite finished). I agree that that sense of zeitgeist which we used to have is no longer there but I would be more than happy for you to occasionally direct me through the maze of mediocrity to find something worth watching, providing I guess that you can find it yourself!
I'm glad I've helped lead you to anything you've found worthwhile. I certainly don't think good TV isn't being made. There is, surrounded by a lot of shit you have to wade through to find it. And even the shit isn't necessarily bad. It's just...not great. And there's too much of it. So somehow, everything is diluted because of it. I want to watch TV everyone around me is watching at the same time. Live TV, which dominated until about 2013, was key to that.
I agree with this although there has always been plenty of bad TV out there (although I take your point about quantity generally) and what I tend to find is that I am signposted to the good stuff through my friends, and sometimes I do the signposting too. That way I do have people to discuss it with so I don’t always feel I’m watching alone.
For me in Brooklyn in the 90’s it was definitely Martin. We all watched. It was easy to find. Easy to get into. Sure I was going on and on about Homicide. But Martin was the show we all watched. I loved ER & NYPD Blue. We had as I say about hip hop-back then balance (I had De La Soul and Wu Tang with Snopp and Dre, Outkast and the Roots all in one 74 minute CD! Now that’s balance).
Interestingly I just finished Is Not Tv it’s HBO book. And like everything in this industry what got called prestige tv was never meant to be. In the end The Wire and Sopranos were made and shot like old tv. All HBO did to be honest was let them curse, show nudity and deal with things that need more than a one word reply.
They were made by people who were tv people. Through and through. They now had “their shot”. They knew where not to go. They knew what they could get away with. They weren’t trying to make prestige shows.
David Simon just wanted to add a small twist to the cop procedural. David Chase had this idea of reviving the gangster genre but wanted an edge.
Given his background and he was seeing a psychiatrist he thought why not have this gangster secretly see a doctor because his mothers is driving him up a wall? Simon-what is the drug war really about? That sentence don’t seem prestigey to me, lol!
See that? Small twists. On an ongoing thing-shows about work or procedurals.
I don’t know what Amazon was doing with “Citadel” or the 21st century iteration of HBO (was that an HBO Max joint and if so who cares?) with “The Idol”.
There’s always been a parallel between shows like the Wire and Mad Men and “conscious” rappers. The ones that kick “real rhymes” but sales don’t match. Nas debut well known in hip hop circles as perhaps the best debut of a rapper ever. Things sold like 30,000 units in a still public buying music era.
I’ve felt most of the fans only went back a few years after the debut and then listened to it but that’s another story.
It’s hard to create any art. But to actually think you can create a classic is silly. But the streamers tried to create tv versions of “Illmatic”.
And what did we get? Ironically we did get a few classics. Some good cuts were made. But like Nas debut. They went nowhere.
Now I can and have killed all hip hop fans for their ridiculously mishap of not buying the album of your life when it debuted due to youthful arrogance.
With these tv shows though I don’t care if everything is an Illmatic it’s impossible to see them all. The Wire on basic cable barely drew flies. But it wasn’t as hard to find it back then.
Smartly HBO let it live perhaps knowing over time people would subscribe or buy the disc set. Either way the show got scene and people got paid.
Cut to the last ten years and it’s been a mess. The number one streamer got there by lying about EVERYTHING. Got the whole industry gassed to follow their lead now for them to only go back to what cable networks were running away from.
The mistake in all of this was the CEOs ignoring the new tech, meanwhile once it hit they then tried to retroactively upgrade everything at the same time.
Early on HBO could’ve brought Netflix but was spooked by the TW/AOL debacle.
When netflix switched to streaming while still doing dvd rentals, no one seemed to think-hey what’s the legacy for these physical products? What about our library?
Nope instead the studios just let dvds go picked apart their libraries for netflixs pleasure.
A decade later they found themselves in a race they couldn’t win. What it really comes down to was the studios got use to the old way of making money. And like when cable first started streaming was not a threat and more of a joke.
The similarities to how Hollywood treated both cable and steaming when they entered the business is similar.
What help cable got was cast offs and first timers. The programming was minor league at best. And they were laughed at by the establishment. But by 89 a decade or so in -HBO was the one doing the laughing. (Jumped on a product the networks had but slept on -boxing. Use to be free on ABC but then HBO did a netflix. Then Mike Tyson fell into HBO’s lap and the rest is history).
Nowadays it’s a mess. I just canceled fubo because they ditched the Mets network SNY. Shopped around and had to go back to DirecTV for the same price.
If you add that bill and the other services plus my isp bill it’s no question $150+ more than my last cablevision bill in 2011. And here you got the Bourne franchise on two different streamers at the same time. You would’ve never saw that with HBO and Showtime in the 90’s.
And what am I watching? The Sopranos.😜
I love all of this, from the reference to "MARTIN" -- which was a staple for my friends and I in Detroit while I was straddling high school graduation -- to ILLMATIC, to what made early "Peak TV" so goddamn good. I can't respond to all of this, but if you haven't read my interview with Carly Wray from this past week, you might find it interesting. She worked with a lot of these TV greats who learned what they were doing from TV pre-Peak and she's very articulate about some of the points you're making here. https://colehaddon.substack.com/p/q-and-a-screenwriter-carly-wray-on
I was out in the world with other people who also did not own TVs back then. So not only had I never watched 'Friends', I'd also never seen 'The Wire'. By 2007, I decided I should see some of these things.... The summer James Gandolfini died, I binged The Sopranos, and started watching Mad Men, which I loved, ditto for Breaking Bad, and, grudgingly, GoT.
THEN I found myself in that spiral of more-and-more-shows -to-watch thing you're talking about. And yes, my lifestyle had changed a lot. I was back to watching massive amounts of TV, like when I was a child. It cut into my writing time, and yes, I was depressed. It was horrible. I had to do a complete reset of everything to get out of that.
As Ted Gioia said last week, the name of the game is distraction now, not entertainment.
Streaming platforms are too successful, yet writers are still being abused, hard, and .even the biggest platforms are losing money and subscribers. So yes, too much of a good thing has a terrible flattening effect on its appeal and maintaining quality is much harder.
Martin Scorsese just made a very interesting commercial for Bleu de Chanel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR1fQeRqUEY
What do you think of that? It's like Vss for film.
P.S. Disney at this point is a vampire squid. Its holdings are so vast. I guess that's the only strategy now.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3oKqdPtenYBWASAp97bNnnkJUKDRL3nlrAY2slSkkWe9X3Y_gH5ngdSWs_aem_AftCKx3sHQDJT_ATdKpOHp2qr-iYvq6HDu4B8xdhWi8vZ4q0E9XwCI7mFhgmCCKZOh8sP7xFcKTTtqIg11NpICUe
Agree with so many of your points here. I'm going to watch the Scorsese commercial later when my kids are off to school - I've been looking forward to it!
Struck by your insight that too much information is depressing us. Been really feeling this lately and pulling back from social media. Particularly now that so much of it is flooded with AI generated nonsense or staged clout chasing garbage. Grateful for your newsletter so I can read something that provokes creative thinking without having to wade into the muck!
What a lovely thing to say. I'll continue to do my best to keep you out of the muck!
I’m a little gobsmacked by synchronicity reading this, as I was just journaling this morning about content proliferation and information overload as a modern Tower of Babel rendering humanity-at-large incapable of productive discourse and collective action. 🤯
I think you're saying we're both geniuses. I accept this analysis.
Did you mention the water cooler? Offices used to have water cooler moments. TV writers used to aim for the water cooler moment. Do people still have water coolers? Do people still have offices? I too never saw Friends. Or The West Wing. I committed to West Wing recently, loved it and the characters, looked forward to it for both education and entertainment, and am astounded to report meeting several people who have watched the entire shebang 3 times each. Streaming does not come with a water cooler. A retired tv exec predicts live to air will be used primarily for live sport events, watched together with other devices playing games or music ... I ask you then, is it possible Sustack is the new water cooler? You may have given us our first moment.
I think TV is in a rapid state of evolution and we're probably going to see "live TV" return in some form of another besides sports, but we'll see. I didn't use the term "water cooler" myself, but it's basically what I'm discussing. Whether in your high school class room or at work or at the bar with your friends, TV and film used to be something we could talk about TOGETHER.
You make some excellent points in this article, and I can honestly say that I have experienced many of the same things you refer to.
I'm glad to hear the piece resonated with you.
This was moving - and I never thought about the correlation of not having things to connect on in this way. I do want to ask - we are definitely in the decline of macro-culture, but it does seem to be making the space for the rise of micro-culture which could be a good thing! The worry I see in us “going back” to where everyone is watching the same few shows - is how many FEWER opportunities that means for artists, whether it’s directors, actors, writers, crew, etc.
The thing is, there were too many people employed during peak TV. It was unsustainable, and that's why production has crashed. So, I wonder which is worse: convincing people they have a future in an industry, letting them invest their lives in it, and then casting them off *or* having fewer jobs. Because at the end of the day, fewer showers didn't mean that many fewer writers, statistically speaking. A season of "ER" required a massive room, some of these shows had up to twenty. During peak TV, an eight-episode season might have five or six and the room only runs four or five months, maybe six, instead of almost a full year. So, writers have to scrabble to get a second job, so they're then spending twice as much time pursuing work as they previously did...with the added bonus that the show they *were* on has a very limited chance of returning, whereas you knew you were coming back for the next season of "MATLOCK". Jobs are irrelevant if you can't build a life and have a family with them. They're not just there to satisfy artistic ambitions. If people wanted to do that with that level of anxiety, they could just pursue indie film in between their regular jobs - which used to be a normal thing people did to be both an artist and secure their futures. I'm rambling a bit, but my point, at the end of this, is they used to make A LOT more films and the TV that was made provided a lot more SECURITY. On top of that, development was more robust, so there were more jobs in between the ones on go movies and shows. If you asked me which market I'd prefer to work in, I'd take the one that died, not the one that existed five years ago.
Is there a way in which this becomes a good thing in combining the connection of the old with finding others (online but then transferred to IRL experiences) but in a more niche way?
Before TV made us lose our individuality by making us corporate beings... "just by watching it" (Marshal McCluhan) what did we do..?
I have hundreds of photos of my grandparents spending every waking minute of their lives partying with large groups of people, attending concerts, dancing, and otherwise living a life I yearn for.
Gosh, this. I'm trying to remember the last TV-series I was really fond of. LOST? Maybe the first season of Walking Dead? After that I stopped watching 'new' TV shows. Wait, correction -- my husband and I follow that Oak Island show on History Channel. It brings us joy to follow the Lagina brothers. We did watch Downton Abbey when it ran. Now? We watch Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Highly recommend it. Bette Davis and Clark Gable and the gang!
I left the US in 2017 and, with it, I lost TCM. I miss TCM more than I miss a single other thing in the US...with the exception of perhaps autumn, apple cider, and Halloween.