Is TV's Golden Age (Officially) Over? A Statistical Analysis (statsignificant.com) 72
Scripted TV production peaked in 2022 at 599 shows and has declined since, according to FX's research division tracking. New prestige series have dropped sharply while streaming platforms prioritize returning shows over new development. Netflix has shifted majority output to unscripted content including docuseries and reality programming since 2018.
YouTube leads streaming viewership ahead of Netflix, Paramount+, and Hulu. Free ad-supported platforms YouTube, Tubi and Roku Channel continue gaining market share. Subscription prices across major streaming services have increased while scripted content volume decreased. Second season of Severance cost $200 million. Fourth season of Stranger Things reached $270 million in production expenses.
YouTube leads streaming viewership ahead of Netflix, Paramount+, and Hulu. Free ad-supported platforms YouTube, Tubi and Roku Channel continue gaining market share. Subscription prices across major streaming services have increased while scripted content volume decreased. Second season of Severance cost $200 million. Fourth season of Stranger Things reached $270 million in production expenses.
Been 20+ years now... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Been 20+ years now... (Score:5, Insightful)
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By that standard there was never a golden age. TV has always been mostly filler and cheap crap.
What they are referring to here is the recent glut of high production value shows produced by new entrants to the streaming market. Lots of miniseries, and some longer form stuff. Sadly a lot of good shows got cancelled.
Now those same services seem to be cutting back budgets and thinning out release schedules.
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By that standard there was never a golden age. TV has always been mostly filler and cheap crap.
What they are referring to here is the recent glut of high production value shows produced by new entrants to the streaming market. Lots of miniseries, and some longer form stuff. Sadly a lot of good shows got cancelled.
Now those same services seem to be cutting back budgets and thinning out release schedules.
"Good" scripted shows seem to suffer from eternal production hell. With two to four years between "seasons" of six to ten 42-55 minute episodes, it's hard to keep an audience interested in. Why these networks/services insist on throwing massive amounts of money and time into production, then skimp out on decent directing and acting, not to mention scripts, is beyond me. I'd rather watch an hour of James Spader and William Shatner riffin' on Boston Legal than most of these "high production value" shows that
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I wish there wasn't so much stigma with animated shows. Star Trek Prodigy is some of the best we have had in years, but was relegated to being a "kids show" and cancelled. If those types of shows were marketed towards adults more, not just edgey adult comedy cartoons, it could open up a whole new market of quality shows produced on a lower budget and on a shorter timeline.
Marvel is kinda trying to with What If, but like most Marvel stuff it's shit.
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A very underrated show.
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then skimp out on decent directing and acting, not to mention scripts
Its the advertisers, how many sitcoms were ruined by putting a kid and an animal where the didn't belong? Some brain dead exec wanted more familys to watch so more kids is what you got, I remember Newhart being told he had to have a kid added, and he said "Great, who's gonna play Bob?" Advertisers just want the minimum shit, so you get shit. Gotta sell cornflakes, no wait cars, maybe cyanide (smokes). I quit when the dead and dying puppy commercials started, maybe 2010.
Oh. and remember when 70's Battles
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then skimp out on decent directing and acting, not to mention scripts
Its the advertisers, how many sitcoms were ruined by putting a kid and an animal where the didn't belong? Some brain dead exec wanted more familys to watch so more kids is what you got, I remember Newhart being told he had to have a kid added, and he said "Great, who's gonna play Bob?" Advertisers just want the minimum shit, so you get shit. Gotta sell cornflakes, no wait cars, maybe cyanide (smokes). I quit when the dead and dying puppy commercials started, maybe 2010.
Oh. and remember when 70's Battlestar added the cute kid and that shitstain robot dog? Wonder what deadbrain thought that was a good idea, it wasn't the writers.
The kid was shit, yes, but it added a young Jane Seymore to the equation as the mother. Hard to argue that was a negative move. Great actress and pretty decent plots surrounding her character.
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At least it used to be that most American shows had 20 or more episodes per year, year on year for the run of the show. TNG had something like 36 episodes per year. Crazy schedule for the cast and crew. Simpsons has put out 20+ episodes per year for 30 years.
In the UK things have always been different. One full series is usually a lot fewer episodes (many of the most popular shows had
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As I recall what killed Star Trek Enterprise was it had fewer viewers on free-to-air TV than Battlestar Galactica on subscription satellite and cable TV. The target audience was split among the two shows, or maybe it was just embarrassing to see viewer numbers so low compared to a show on a subscription service. With numbers like that it kind of exposed what people thought of the scripts and production.
Personality of reality versus surreality? (Score:2)
It's also a matter of needing less training. The skilled actors were so valuable because they could pretend to be constructed characters. In the context of a novel or other source, the whole story makes sense and there aren't extraneous elements and needless distractions. The characters do just what is needed to illustrate their characters and to advance the plot.
Real life is different. Most of the events that happen are just random noise and there is no plot. We (often referring to 'historians') interpret
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Not Outside the US (Score:4, Insightful)
While the golden age has ended now in Europe too - the BBC is a pale shadow of its former self - I'd say it lasted longer that US TV that, from my point of view, was already dead back in the late 90's. The only way I could watch anything on US TV was to tape it and then fast forward through the incessant breaks. Streaming revived things for a while back when it was just Netflix but now that has got fragmented, ads are creeping in again and I expect that will be almost as bad as TV by the time they are finished unless someone manages to develop an ad blocker that works on them.
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Thankfully the big players in streaming all offer no-ad tiers (so I can watch all my Disney+ shows without having to worry about ads at all). Sure they cost more but not enough that I am willing to put up with ads OR the effort involved in going sailing for my content.
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For factual non current affairs... (Score:2)
... content youtube pisses all over TV whether broadcast or streaming. OTOH I wouldn't trust a much of the clickbait "news" on youtube if my life depended on it and as for dramas - forget it. Also quality != quantity and so long as new dramas are commissioned then TV still has life in it yet.
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Sound like the article is not about the rage-generating entertainment that passes for "news" these days, but those neverending TV series.
I heard the "AI" will fill in the blanks (Score:1)
Given enough power, it will generate new X-files episodes until the heat death of the Universe.
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That sounds like a core idea that could be expanded into a (new) episode of the X-files...
After the script writters went into strike in 2023 (Score:1)
Re: After the script writters went into strike in (Score:3)
Slow Horses and The Studio were both pretty great. Black Mirror is consistently great.
Severance I can take or leave. But it's not like there's "nothing".
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Clearly you haven't seen some of the latest episodes of Futuruama...
Or the Fallout TV series. (one of the best TV series I have seen in a long time)
For me? Yes. (Score:3)
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whole concept that everybody has to watch a show at the exact same time is obsolete
In the sense that largely isn't happening any more yes. In the sense that 'water cooler' television gave as a social opportunity to have some organic national discussions about the issues of the day with a little shared context, I am not so sure.
Obviously it put the power to chose the topics of our national discourse in the hands a very smaller number of people, but it did give everyone an opportunity to discuss their view of the same content.
Re:For me? Yes. (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems like 'Watercooler cooler' tv peaked with GoT and every other attempt (WestWorld, Rings of Power, Succession, etc) has generated some buzz but nothing near peak GOT S3-S4.
And now that it turns out there's no lasting economy of scale with subscription tv (wait for full season to drop, subscribe for a month to watch, cancel), I doubt there will be many more big-budget shows in the future, at least until business models change again. Apple, Amazon, and Netflix (to a lesser degree) subsidize their shows but I feel that's going to be ending in the next few years.
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You are probably right about the GoT being the last great example. I'd put the bookend of that era of water cooler tv about 2013 when Netflix started doing first party content, and phasing out disk by mail.
That is about the time when most of the big general public audience started getting pretty consistent access to non-physical-distribution and non-OTA content and with it the explosion of choice and truly pain free time-shifting. Past which point nothing can get temporally constrained mass audience number
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national discussions about the issues of the day
"Breaking Bad" is issues of the day? IMO, that would be the news.
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Yes it very much was; While it was a fictional drama it did explore topics like:
1) the cost of healthcare
2) the approach to the drug war
3) the limits of police powers
just to name a few things off the top of my head. Is it a great 'source' for study of any of those topics, no obviously not but it might introduce them in a way that makes some people care or start a larger discussion about those subjects in friendly settings where they'd otherwise not come up.
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1) the cost of healthcare
2) the approach to the drug war
3) the limits of police powers
IMO, it didn't deal with these very realistically. But if they are your pet issues, then everything is a foot in the door to discuss them.
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everything except sports should be time shifted to the viewer's convenience.
Right, entertainment can be easily time shifted. However, sports and news are time sensitive, and not surprisingly those are the types of programming that still draw advertising money for linear TV. It's especially interesting to see that even though most sports can be conveniently watched from a recording (without even needing a DVR), there is still a huge audience for live sports.
The really interesting thing to watch out for in the next few years is whether the post-cable multi-channel streamers like YT
Been over for some time (Score:5, Interesting)
The golden age of TV ended when the scripted age of TV gave way to low-effort 'reality' TV.
For most, best shows came after reality TV (Score:2)
More Redefining Words? (Score:1, Troll)
The Golden Age of television was the 40s and 50s. It's been over for about 70 years.
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Netflix (Score:2)
"Netflix has shifted majority output to unscripted content including docuseries and reality programming since 2018."
Yup and all the while raising prices to boot. I liked Netflix a lot but I dropped my subscription when I saw that their new norm was basically the reality TV boom in the 00's which is when I cut the cord on cable TV.
Now that these services have become too numerous and turned shitty and expensive we'll get to hear about how awful the piracy problem has become. What fun.
No (Score:3)
Something isn't over just because it has peaked. While I wish there was more, compared to when I was younger there are a lot more shows available.
What I do kinda dislike though is these mini-abbreviated seasons that have been adopted on new shows. I know its due to expense, but 10 episodes feels kinda short for a season when the shows I grew up with would have 20 to 26 episodes per season. And while I can deal with 10 - a lot of shows have been trying to get away with "seasons" of 6 episodes or less. 6 episodes of TV isn't a season - its a long movie chopped into pieces.
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I try to view it (for prestige shows) as 8-10 film quality shows (4-5 movies) but when they do the short seasons for basic comedies, yeah, that feels cheap.
And then there's the British weird season stuff; 4-6 episodic episodes and then a year or two later, another 4-6 episodes, going on for 2 decades or so. Thinking of Jonathon Creek and Poirot.
Short Seasons (Score:4, Interesting)
It used to be 26 episodes per season, with each episode airing twice during the year. It was a nice, simple way of filling the broadcast schedule. That shifted to 24 episodes at some point. There was a bigger shift, I think in the early 2000s, where they started having separate shows for the summer, and seasons started getting much shorter, sometimes more like 13 episodes. Now streaming services will put out 6-7 episode seasons; only a quarter of what a season used to be.
The good part of this is that you no longer get filler episodes. I remember watching shows like Stargate SG-1, and there were inevitably a few junk episodes, like a clip show that has some excuse to edit together a bunch of clips of previous episodes, or some episode that really didn't do much because they clearly spent all their budget already. I don't miss those. But with only 6 episodes, it's down to the same run-time as a miniseries, and things sometimes feel rushed.
For shows that are telling a story over the course of a season, the shorter episodes sometimes work well, but for more episodic shows (like Doctor Who), it just feels like you're getting shorted (because you are).
For many shows, the driving force is the quality of the writing and acting. Would the studios do better to spend less on the production and get more episodes for the same money? Good stories outweigh good effects.
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It used to be 26 episodes per season, with each episode airing twice during the year.
And before that, there were even more. Man From U.N.C.L.E., for instance, ran 30 episodes per season. I Love Lucy ran 35.
TV has changed a lot, many times.
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Somewhat amusing that back in the day UK actors lived in dread that their 6-12 episode/year series would get imported to the US and it's 26 episode treadmill. How can a real actor play the same character more than a dozen times a year? But now with streaming these short British length runs are the norm.
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From what I've seen, those 6-12 episodes tended to be longer than the 42 minutes the average hour show is in the US (on top of no commercials).
But yeah, there was a different attitude about the work.
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Go back and watch Star Trek TNG, Babylon 5 or Stargate SG1. How many filler eps were there? Holodeck episodes, clip episodes, dream episodes, so on and so forth. Having to fill 20 or more episodes in 1 year of shooting means that they end up having to use a lot of filler (there's not a lot of meat in these gym mats). Old British shows were generally the opposite, less filler and more story however there would be fewer episodes. I recently did a re-watch of
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Nothing like watching 8 episodes of a good show and then having to wait 3 years for another season.
I agree (Score:2)
I recently watched a The Critical Drinker video where he bemoaned the state of TV these days, where a "season" is really a 6-8 episode mini-series, and then you have to wait two bloody years for the next season, by which time you've pretty much forgotten about the show, and any kind of momentum is lost. Back in the day when a season was 22-24 episodes, with a couple of shorter mid-season breaks, there was only a few months between the end of one season and the beginning of the next, and you could really sta
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And the lunch boxes released durning the summer.
Where's all the Breaking Bad and Game Of Thrones tin lunchboxes with major scenes impressed in steel and enamel?!!
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Where's all the Breaking Bad and Game Of Thrones tin lunchboxes with major scenes impressed in steel and enamel?!!
Pretty sure those shows weren't for kids. There is no shortage of Stranger Things merch, though.
True, but you gotta cherry-pick pretty hard (Score:2)
I don't care for 8 episode seasons either (ffs, Squid Game...), but entire 20 episode seasons of brilliance are rare. Clip shows, episodes that don't go anywhere (X-Files...), and that's before we get to the really awful sitcom stuff.
Free OTA CoziTV runs episodes of Alice and Facts of Life, multi-season shows which wouldn't make it past the first pitch today. YMMV, but I wouldn't impose full seasons of The Nanny on my worst enemy... ... and so on.
Can't be done quantitatively (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is the number of scripted shows doesn't tell us much about the number of quality scripted shows, and quality is in the eye of the beholder. TV has continued to adapt over the years, and people have different preferences. There was:
1) The original "golden age" in the 1950s when TV was just starting up. Because there were only a small number of channels and because everything had to be of general interest, these were relatively high effort productions but were unable to take any real risks. It tended to be more "light entertainment" than anything serious.
2) The 60s-70s was the dawn of color and the beginning to diversify into some level of special interest. But the increase in volume meant production values were typically far below film.
3) The 80-90s was when cable started to seriously challenge broadcast and TV became a mature medium. A lot of TV was pretty vapid dreck. The insipid laugh tracks and tired gags. But there's still a lot of nostalgia for the sitcoms of that era. Nobody was yet trying for a cinematic experience in TV.
4) 00s-2010s was the beginning of "prestige" TV (in part as a reaction to cheaply produced "reality" TV). Cable and early streaming produced shows like the Sopranos (cable) and House of Cards/Breaking Bad (streaming) that had dramatic ambitions and production quality of feature film. That era isn't fully over, but the streaming wars have caused the sheer volume of prestige TV to hit its limits.
5) 2020s-present has been defined by the rise of youtubers and the streaming wars.
The general arc has been more and more segmentation in entertainment. Early TV entertainment had to appeal to the widest possible audience because there were only 2-3 choices of what to watch. Today, there's content for every conceivable niche and it's available at any time of day or night (no competition for timeslots anymore). This is great if you want content tailored to your specific interest, but it can make it hard to break through as something intended for a general audience. With AI, we could envision a world where media is created specifically for you individually and the number of "shows" becomes infinite.
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What I find impressive is that there are many YouTube channels putting out weekly content that's better produced than most of the dreck that was released in the 1990's.
How much TV do we really need? (Score:2)
So if the pace of new content creation starts to slow down...who cares? There's more to life than watching TV anyway.
I also don't get how
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an Interesting thought exercise.... I liked Stranger Things, I want to see it wrap up. imagine for a second you were in the position to chose if the money was spent on Stranger Things or some other cause?
Put computers in schools?
cancer research?
makes you weight opportunity cost for sure.
in 10 years Netflix will pull Stanger things from their listings dissolve into a foot note....but computers in schools could create careers.
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Put computers in schools? cancer research?
I totally agree, although it's not a totally end-sum game as a huge proportion of that $250 million went to salaries and jobs (not just the actors and writers, but also bus drivers, painters, security guards, etc.) many of whom pay taxes and contribute to the public good in other ways, too. :)!
Unfortunately for investors, schools and cancer research usually take too long to produce a profit to be interesting investments
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TV golden age (Score:3)
Drek, for a price (Score:2)
It's already mentioned: Cable television became popular when free networks switched to re-runs and reality shows. Now, cable television will offer the drek that's already free, for a price. It doesn't take a job in economics to guess what happens next.
Given current events (Score:2)