Ten years ago when Netflix’s political drama House of Cards was released, the television landscape and the idea of what might be possible in the realm of small-screen entertainment looked as if they were about to change.
The company, which boldly announced it was going to change the way we thought about television, looked as if it was going to do just that. No longer would television shows be reliant on ratings and advertising to survive but rather if creators had interesting and new ideas, they could find a home for these on the streaming platform, which coupled with a few tentpole nostalgic favourites like Friends, would offer a new way of reaching audiences who for their subscriber fee would be able to find content to satisfy a variety of tastes. No matter your standards, if you subscribed to one of the many streaming services — or even all of them — you would always be able to find something to watch.
Now after every studio has launched its own streaming platform and tried to get viewers to spend money on multiple platforms, rather than selling product to established platforms like Netflix or Prime Video or, in SA’s case, Multichoice’s Showmax, you’re probably spending more money and have less quality product to choose from.
The new world of television, which was supposed to ensure a new type of show, has become like the old world of television, where in spite of the number of promised options, there’s little worth watching. Shows that were supposed to find a permanent home have been dropped — doomed to never be found anywhere again; and reportedly new anticipated content has sometimes been cancelled before it reaches a platform, never to be seen by anyone at all, in spite of time and money spent on its production.
What was promised as a new space where risks could be taken, has instead become a decidedly risk-free space full of reboots of old network television shows and non-English versions of American genre shows. A network like AMC, which was once the proud home of groundbreaking shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, now seems to be dedicated to producing as many spin-offs of The Walking Dead as it can.
Netflix’s offerings are increasingly unimaginative with spin-offs and sequels of already proven shows and a plethora of absurd reality television products dominating its offerings, especially in the light of its subscriber losses in 2022, which have spooked the biggest streaming platform into taking few chances on new content and offering an ad-supported package that will do what we were promised streaming wouldn’t — interrupt programming with commercials. Even a prestige network like HBO has begun to cancel shows before they’ve been allowed to screen and removed a host of older content from its HBO Max platform, consigning it to the ether and narrowing the choice options for subscribers.
John Landgraf, the head of FX, responsible for coining the term “peak TV” in 2015, has suggested that that era, with its promise of quality, original and innovative programming, is over. As more players have entered the market and the number of new scripted shows has jumped from 370 in 2015 to 599 in 2022 — the offerings on platforms have become safe, anodyne and uniform in their search for audience numbers over any dedication to telling new or interesting stories. In January Landgraf warned that we are probably headed for the era of “trough TV”, where all possibilities of originality are being consumed by the demands of profit.
Purse strings are tightening, bets are safer and the idea that a show could be sustained by a small but dedicated fanbase is no longer enough to guarantee its existence as all the players in the streaming game look to protect their bottom lines rather than take a chance on growing new audiences through the production of new, original or challenging content.
For a moment it looked as if the plethora of services created in an effort by networks and studios to make their own money through distribution of their own content, rather than hand that content over to secondary distributors like Netflix, might have been a good thing that proved Gordon Gecko’s famous Reagan era maxim that “greed is good”. Predictably as those networks and studios have realised, when you increase the number of players all looking to make money from the same audience pool, it turns out that for consumers, greed is bad and boring.
Though we may have begun our descent from the heights of the peak TV era, we haven’t reached the bottom yet. There are still quality shows out there that push the boundaries of the small screen and some of them — like HBO’s The Rehearsal — have even been renewed for further seasons, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule.
In a post-pandemic crisis of uncertainty for all content production coupled with subscribers tightening their belts in the wake of cost-of-living constraints brought about by geopolitical misadventures like the war in the Ukraine, mainstream entertainment both in theatres and on our home screens is less and less willing to conduct any risky business and discerning creators and viewers are once again the casualties.
The bottom is fast approaching but how many streaming players or subscribers will be left to witness the crash remains to be seen because, right now, there really is almost nothing to watch.
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