I’ve long rooted for television to be seen on the same level as film. My preferred visual medium, I’ve looked to television to fill the void of my days for as long as I can remember. For me to watch a film from beginning to end, I’d have to basically be forced: either by social circumstances (friends who outvoted me on what to watch at a hangout) or if there was simply no television shows for me to watch. Or, rarely, I’d have to really be interested in either the actors or synopsis of the film. I had a short attention span before it was cool.
There are more complex reasons I think television — at its best — is the superior medium, but we’re not here to talk about those. Maybe one day. Today’s question for the class is: is television as a reliable medium itself dying?
Think back to the Golden Era of Television. We were spoiled. We got 13 to 22 episode seasons that ran almost weekly for 8 months out of the year. The actors were basically always filming, because that’s what the old model of television demanded. They didn’t have time to fill their calendars with other work between seasons1. You signed a contract, you were on that show, your character was your identity. Imagine if The Sopranos took more than a year between seasons, allowing James Gandolfini to take work elsewhere? Would we have come to know him as synonymous with Tony Soprano? Imagine if Bryan Cranston set his sights elsewhere after the first season of Breaking Bad, mentally checking out because he wasn’t being sent scripts? Would the show have grown over its run to become one of the most critically acclaimed of all time?
For about 25 years beginning in the late ‘90s, television was solidly giving film a run for its money as a prestige medium. Shows like Sex and the City, The Wire, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Veep, The Office, and 30 Rock put out banger after banger season. We even continued great-to-prestige television into the 2010s with Game of Thrones, Scandal, Orange is the New Black, House of Cards, The Crown, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Dare I add Bob’s Burgers to this list, as well?2
But as streaming has come to dominate TV, it has shattered the old model of making weekly, episodic stories with longevity. Now, it is normal to wait at minimum one, more often two or three years between seasons. That is, if the show makes it past a first season. It’s pretty much standard for seasons to be at most 10 episodes. We wait years for crumbs. At the core of this shift seems to be a desire by showrunners to make TV like film. For example, the cinematography of Euphoria is arguably what made it, in particularly its first season, mesmerizing to fans. It felt cinematic. It felt bigger than television.
As budgets swelled, TV seasons began to take longer to shoot. Gradually, it became typical for a television production to rival the length of a movie’s. More than that, streamers treat series debuts like opening weekend box office for films, where if it is not immediately popular, it is deemed a waste and promptly cancelled.
I began pondering if television was dead upon hearing about the latest Netflix cancellation, Dead Boy Detectives. I’d never even heard of this series prior to this news. It’s rare that I hear about new show at all outside of internet buzz or word-of-mouth. It seems streamers rely on their algorithms to do their marketing for them. It’s as if they release these shows onto their platforms and say “It’s above me now.” Which is a shame, because not all of these shows deserve the small audiences or cancellations they receive. I’ve seen many folks say that Apple TV quietly has some of the best shows streaming, but they simply do not market them on a grand scale to get eyeballs on them. Marketing costs money, however, and so does continuing shows once they’re popular, so I suppose you could surmise why streamers have this lackadaisical approach.
The exceptions to this are, you guessed it, the series with the biggest budgets. An example that leaps to mind is Stranger Things. A show that I began watching on my honeymoon in 2017 will only debut its fifth and final season in 2025 because the budget and episode lengths have increased with every season.
Perhaps we can blame HBO and Game of Thrones for this; the big budget productions of GoT lent to the expansive world and historical accuracy the series was praised for. After Game of Thrones raised the bar on television production to massive success, other studios sought to duplicate their formula.
In chasing cinema, makers of television have lost the plot. The entire benefit at inception of television was that it was 1) inexpensive to produce compared to film, and 2) more accessible to the public due to its episodic nature. It was possible to gamble on a show and have a degree of trust that it would build an audience over time. Now, executives are so unwilling to bet on new ideas that network TV pilots have plummeted since the pandemic.
Film, on the other hand, is revitalizing itself post-2020. We are returning to blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick, Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Challengers. The internet is abuzz about subversive middling films like Saltburn, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Fire Island, and Bottoms. We’ve seen dazzling showcases of acting from films like Poor Things, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Anatomy of a Fall. Even the romcom is gaining new life with the likes of The Idea of You and A Family Affair. People are excited to go to the movies again, COVID be damned, and even more excited to talk about these new films.
How often does that happen for TV shows nowadays?
We have a few standouts that seem to galvanize people, like recently-ended Succession, The Bear, The White Lotus, and Abbott Elementary. The latter specifically is committed to resurrecting the old network formula, ending and beginning separate seasons in the same calendar year (the way that sentence doesn’t even sound right….). Interesting to note that the common feature of these shows is that they have weekly (or semi-weekly, in the case of The Bear) episode drops. Audiences could build anticipation between episodes. For me, I’ve dubbed Abbott my “weekly serotonin boost” while its airing, and I actually am sad when it has off weeks. I’ve reminisced about my longing for appointment viewing before in this newsletter.
There may be more TV than ever, but no one wants to start a new series only to have it ripped from them by cancellation the next year, or discover a previously started one only to find out it never got a proper final season (my dearest GLOW, I miss you every day). Our investment is no longer rewarded, so people are turning away from television.
Not to be all “if a tree falls in the forest…” about it, but it is hard to feel that the medium is alive and thriving when it appears everyone, from studios to audiences, has given up on it. We are all sitting idle as television fights for its life on a ventilator.
Who will administer the lifesaving antidote?
Exhibit A: Sam Levinson shackling Zendaya to that dying series Euphoria. If Sam Levinson has no haters, I am dead. Praying on his downfall daily.
Some people wouldn’t because it’s aNiMaTeD, but I would!
AND ANOTHER THING can we talk about this stupid concept of releasing a season in 2 parts? Why are we doing this? Outlander released a season 7A over A YEAR ago and the second part of the season will come out in November. It's so stupid!
Also this is where I found out Dead Boy Detectives got cancelled and that's a bummer 😞 like many shows that ended too soon, the final episode was setting up for more interesting things to happen in the next season and now we'll never know 😠