They call it “Peak TV.” I call it “Broken Sewerpipe TV.” Unfortunately, the sewer pipe was only a little less broken last year. Throughout 2022, that sewer pipe delivered some 2,264 TV shows to American households. Last year, that number dropped to 1,784, which is 480 fewer.
The far-left Hollywood Reporter, in part, blames the writers’ and actors’ strikes, but that doesn’t make much sense. The writers’ strike launched in May of 2023. The actors’ strike launched in July of 2023. Granted, television is a more immediate thing than movies, which means that TV shows get off the ground from inception to broadcast quickly. But I doubt very much that strikes launched in the middle of 2023 did much to affect the 2023 television season. The aftereffects of the strike will probably hit harder this year.
The primary reason for this 21 percent cutback is studios looking to cut costs. The TV business is in serious trouble for three reasons…
First, the affirmative action of cable/satellite TV is dying. At one time, some 100 million American households subscribed to a cable or satellite package. This meant 100 million people paid for dozens of channels and hundreds of shows they never watched. But whether or not you watched, the studios still made tens of billions simply because their channels and shows were part of your cable package. Now that this number is closer to 50 million subscribers, the loss in income is brutal. And it is not being made up in the streaming business.
Second, American are cancelling their cable and moving to streaming. Sadly, for the studios, this is a disaster. Unlike socialist cable, where everyone pays for every channel, streaming is based on merit. You only subscribe to a streamer to watch the programming of Netflix, Disney, Paramount, etc. Other than Netflix, these streaming services are losing billions, which brings me to…
Third, TV sucks today. We went from the gold rush of The Sopranos, Longmire, Lost, The Wire, The Shield, 24, Breaking Bad, The Americans, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Deadwood, Rome, Battlestar Galactica (2004), etc., to a garbage fire of woke virtue signaling, simplistic characters, lectures, scoldings, and gratuitous gay sex in an ocean that is otherwise sexless.
No one is watching any of this crap. Trust me, a population of 335 million people does not need 2,264 TV shows. When the population was closer to 200 million, we survived just fine with a couple of hundred shows.
The viewership for about 80 percent of those 1,784 shows must be in the low thousands, if not lower. And who are they making these shows for? This is not the America I grew up in, where nothing excited us more than The Next New Thing. We’re a country that still goes to Rolling Stones concerts and still watches Star Trek, Law & Order, CSI, NCIS, Fast & Furious 10, and James Bond 28. Even the biggest breakout shows seem to be spin-offs of decades-old franchises, like Wendy and Star Wars This or That.
Americans don’t want What’s Next. They want the comfort of nostalgia and sameness. Donchaknow that an 80-year-old Indiana Jones proves we will all stay young forever?
Because Hollywood has blown it, this talentless, dreadful, hateful industry is wasting billions on hundreds of TV shows no one watches. It’s all about getting one piece of trash to stick. There was a time when three networks produced about 40 shows each, and profits were made from merit: advertising revenue based on viewership numbers. Television shows were produced for normal people, and normal people tuned in by the tens of millions.
If you know what the public wants, there’s no need to produce 2,246 shows per year. But today’s industry has no idea what it’s doing, so instead of the Golden Age, it’s the Broken Sewerpipe Age. But this is what happens when you allow your entertainment company to be infested with leftists obsessed with everything but telling great stories.
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I find myself reading less and less these days as all pop culture (books, movies, music) have degenerated into simplistic “content” that tries to beat you over the head with a message. That being said, I found … Borrowed Time to be refreshing and delightful with complex characters and a messy (re: authentic) world. Also, I have to commend you on your idea of what heaven looks like. Too many writers have a trite vision of heaven, but I found both versions of heaven that you came up with (Doreen’s version of heaven as a campground with the Arthurs and Mason version with Doreen and Hok’ee) to be true to those characters and sublime. — Reader email.
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