The Rise of Streaming and the Death of TV
Streaming services are caught at a strategic crossroads. On the one hand, they’re trying to produce the next big hit, the next Squid Game or Stranger Things, to capture our cultural moment and become a global phenomenon. On the other hand, they are competing for rights to host classic shows, like The Office and Friends, which while not matching the concentrated mania of new shows, retain their value through consistent, year-on-year viewership. Ironically, these shows were made in a model of production that no longer exists. Cable and Broadcast TV has fizzled dramatically in relevance, and yet shows that were made for, restricted by, and perhaps benefited from this old production model remain some of the most persistently popular, even among the companies that have disrupted and reformed the industry that created them.
Not to be ignored are some of the immense benefits of TV shows designed for streaming. For decades, creatives have been limited by 30 minute broadcasting blocks, the need for episodic storytelling, and strict production timelines, while viewers planned around broadcasting hours and ended on cliffhangers every week. The era of streaming is, for some, an era of freedom. Producers have more creative control, no longer having to worry about cutting for a designated run time and fitting the stringent filming schedule needed to produce weekly episodes. Moreover, without a limited broadcasting schedule, there are opportunities for more projects, including niche ideas like Ted Lasso and The White Lotus that may not have been approved in the past, due to a desire for mass appeal with limited air time.
At the same time, though, it does feel like something has been lost along the way. At some point, the collective tension of waiting for the next episode and gathering around the TV for the weekly live broadcast was replaced by hours spent binge watching on our own. Somehow in an era defined by innovation and creativity, shows have fewer episodes than ever and take longer to make.
When streaming first arrived, everyone raved about the convenience, the lack of advertising, and the affordability. Now, with the well-documented decline of cable and broadcast, streaming companies have begun running ads and implementing extra paywalls, while the fragmentation of the market ensures that people need 5 or 6 subscriptions to have access to everything they want. The very same issues that once plagued cable and broadcast have returned, and like so much of our culture, TV has become an attention sink, a commodity that keeps us invested enough to make a profit, but often doesn’t create a truly lasting impact. This is not to say that modern shows aren’t good; they are often brilliantly made. I absolutely love shows like Severance and Squid Game, and streaming has undoubtedly helped make them possible… but I don’t love them like I love the shows I grew up with.
By the time I was old enough, cable and broadcast TV had already passed its peak, but I will always have fond memories of the years I spent watching weekly episodes of Brooklyn 99 and re-runs of Avatar: The Last Airbender with my family. Even now, I find my ability to enjoy TV whenever I want falls short of repeating the old ritual of gathering together after dinner, even if it's not a live broadcast. A part of me wishes I got to see it more, that I had the chance to grow into loving shows over the course of years, looking forward to the new release every week and keeping the characters with me as I grew up.
With hindsight, it's easy to point out how many generic shows there were, how much they suffered from rushed and cheap production, and how many bad episodes there are. I don’t disagree, but streaming feels like a rupture, not an evolution. When done well it’s amazing, but it’s not the same, and even if I love a lot of what we have now, I still miss the way things used to be. I miss falling in love with one randomly brilliant episode of an otherwise ordinary show, I miss the consistency of knowing every week meant a new episode and every year a new season, and I miss the feeling of being gathered to watch something, to witness something together.
Maybe restricted runtimes hindered creative freedom, but they also made for dense writing and efficient storytelling. Maybe some episodes were truly awful, but I would take the variation if it meant we got some unique and brilliant ones too. Maybe old TV was never perfect, but we remember what made it special, that’s why we still watch those classic series more than anything else, and I hope the industry remembers too.