Call it Peak TV or the Golden Age of Television. But with the implosion of Netflix and the CW’s cancelling of nine fan faves, people have been asking:
Is Peak TV over?
And when you deign to suggest that, yes, it is, people in the industry act like they’re HD DVD hearing Blu Ray won the format war.
Let’s be clear here: things have sucked for content creators in the TV space for awhile. Sure, there’s great content that’s been produced and aired recently. But there’s also tons of amazing content, like Tuca and Bertie that have been cut short after only one or two seasons.
Why? Because the hyper-fragmentation of the marketplace has meant investing heavily in hundreds of hyper-specialized shows, overwhelming an audience who now has no idea what to watch. The metrics of success have shifted from Nielsen eyeballs to active monthly subscriptions.
Add in to that the global licensing deals Netflix has bullied its IP holders into relinquishing, and you now have literally thousands of shows available at the push of a button.
As Peter Liguori, former chairman of entertainment at Fox once said at UCLA, money isn't in content creation. It's in owning the pipeline to content.
Decision Fatigue and the Two-Suit Solution
Decision fatigue means every choice draws a sliver of mental energy from a viewer's finite reserves. It’s why Obama said to Vanity Fair, “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”
And now, when you're killing time or just sitting down to unwind, you have choice after choice after choice ahead of you.
Even Netflix, the progenitor of our modern pantheon, has found this to be too overwhelming for the average mortal’s finite decision-making. Why else help curate people’s viewership by informing them about today’s “Top 10 Most Popular” shows? There’s simply too much, and without recommendations or reviews or ratings or someone to hold your hand through the landscape, then you’re left wondering the same thing as Netflix’s other 222 million subscribers: is there anything good to watch?
Quantity > Quality
The sheer glut of programming has made it neigh impossible to find something worth your time. It’s like logging onto Amazon blindly with the hope of finding a good book. Without curation, without a little goddamn discretion, the odds of you randomly stumbling across something worthwhile are nil.
But when subscriptions are more important than eyeballs, there's no concern about creating one hit show that people flock to watch. Instead, it’s a numbers game, and you need to have enough offerings out there so that a potential subscriber finds something worth watching and hits Subscribe. And that’s a shame – because while Severence might finally entice you to try out a month of Apple+, it means you’ve been missing out on two seasons of the phenomenal Morning Show this whole time.
That Treehouse of Horror Episode Where Homer Keeps Gorging on Donuts in Hell
What the printing press did for literature, and what the app store did to software development, so too has streaming done to video: too much content with little to no curation. Phenomenal shows are left to wither on the vine because they’re now competing in a limited ecosystem (competing for a finite number of subscriber eyes) against the giant attractions that brought people in in the first place. It’s like working at an amusement park: of course the ring toss looks pale in comparison to the Santa Monica Ferris wheel. But without a raw eyes-for-eyes metric (which Netflix and other streamers still refuse to provide), there’s no telling how that ring toss performs compared to, say, the whack-a-mole at Playland Arcade two blocks over.
And because the networks airing the content are now overwhelmingly the owners of that content (thanks to the 1993 overturn of the FCC’s Syndication and Financialization rules), it means there’s no reason for studios to consider syndicating their programs – not when they can keep them exclusively for their own streaming platform. Without syndication, there’s no real model left for up-and-coming platforms to raise revenue except by creating a library of exclusive IP: it’s why everyone from HBO Max and Apple+ to Paramount+ and Quibi (RIP) have to continue developing new shows down for an exhausted viewership to choke on.
It Used To Be Called ByteDance
And none of this, by the way, takes into account Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, a new model where the owners can spend nothing developing content because the users are the creators. Netflix’s 222 million global subscribers pale in comparison to TikTok’s 1 billion average monthly users. That’s 13% of the human race.
Even a $30 million episode of Stranger Things (a show that, lest we forget, tried to flout union rules and hire its script coordinator part-time to save money) can’t make a dent in that kind of viewership. The audience—and their attention span— have evolved, and the content being made can’t compete.
Where’s the Future?
So then where are studios supposed to go from here? If they’re not playing the numbers game, are they supposed to adopt HBO’s strategy of quality over quantity? Maybe, but with only 76.8 million subscribers, the long-running giant still only has a third as many viewers as their younger tech start-up competition.
The dichotomy of the content owners vs content creators brings us to an unfortunate but predictable impasse: creators will acquiesce to the terms of those who control the purse. In fact, the pipeline is so saturated with content creators that WB's Writer/Director fellowship no longer feels the need to pay WGA-mandated staff fees to its staff writers and writers are agreeing to work for scale just to keep their health insurance. Without a writer's guild with a spine, the gulf between writer pay and studio profits will continue to grow. That means storytellers need to explore new frontiers where they can own and monetize their content themselves. Whether it's serialized short-form fiction self-published on Amazon's Vella or low-budget TikTok sketches, there's still money to be made from creating IP. But the paychecks won't command the kind of respect staff writers are accustomed to getting or come from a studio. They'll be from Google ads and Amazon token redemptions.
It brings us back to where we came from: content paid for by advertisements. Just like Netflix has figured out. But for creators to thrive, they need to oust the studio from the equation and start thinking like entrepreneurs.
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