"Over time, the expensive signifiers of prestige TV — the movie stars, the set pieces, the cinematography — became so familiar and easy to appropriate that it could take viewers six or seven hours to realize the show they were watching was a fugazi."
I didn't know it until now but is so true! I don't start a lot of shows because it takes me practically a full season to know if I like it. I'm slow to get off the train. This explains a lot.
Also 24 is a great example of the issue you talk about here. That was just a damn good mass audience show. New actors/characters were rotating in and out every season, yet the show remained consistently good.
I mean, I don't know, I think I'd rather live in a world where a bunch of people who made four good seasons of a show keep getting paid for an extra five bad seasons (that people still seem interested in watching) than the world where people don't even get a chance to make a second or third season
great stuff! your point about good network tv vs trash "prestige" is why i like Bosch and wish more streaming services went for a show like it; it's a network show in all but format and platform, with its seasons having clearly defined start and end points with a somewhat higher level of production. it's like an elevated law and order, the ultimate network tv show.
As a writer and director who’s trying to break into tv, holy shit this is so sanity inducing to read. I really agree about lack of care and attention being the underlying problem in making mid content. My beliefs about that are just from about seeing who actually leads these teams, and talking with producers and people who fit well in the system. There was a profile of Bella Bajaria last year that showed she’s just really only able or interested in saying, “yes, great! Keep going!” There was no real engagement with the content itself, just a drive to get more of it. And that is definitely what has changed.
All the pitch and general meetings I’ve had lately with streamers and broadcasters who are being forced to transition to streaming are emphasizing how little they want dramedies and the other prestige formats, and how much they are betting on straightforward comedies and procedurals. But like you point out, it’s not just about the changing form away from prestige - it’s motivated by a need to spend their resources more wisely.
And that makes sense, yknow? From a risk management standpoint, you gotta take surer bets. But the thing that’s more quietly stated is that they have so much more time, as dev execs. They can read scripts now; the norm previously was that you gotta just give them a deck and maybe a bible and get a dev green light on that. They now have time for feedback. And I think the good ones who do give a shit about film and TV are gonna thrive in this new environment, where less is being made, and their capacity to really bring their skills and experience to bear will actually be fun for them and good for the fewer things that are getting made.
Kinda terrifying to navigate as a new writer. But maybe a good thing for people in it who are more into the eternal values of tv: being non-precious and collaborative because fuck, you gotta get something done!
I think you're misreading this quote: “Back-end payments existed because Europeans were willing to watch our garbage, and Americans were willing to watch repeats of that garbage on cable at 11 at night.”
The point of the "11 at night" part isn't that people don't watch trash, it's that they don't watch reruns (outside of a few sitcoms). This is been true, more or less, since TiVo came along but streaming has supercharged it, and without reruns there isn't a secondary revenue stream (i.e. a second set of ads run against the rerun that is distinct from the ads run against the first run) to fund the residuals. This goes to why seasons used to be 24 seasons long and emphasized consistency: they were made for people who were going to miss some episodes. Again, that's not a problem now, people are completists because you don't just skip episode eight if you had a PTA meeting that night. So the same person that is watching 8 episodes of The Bear might only have watched eight episodes of Ally McBeal in any given seasons. Except now that person can be serviced with an eight episode season whereas before you needed to make more episodes so that when they happened to tune in there was something new for them to watch.
This is a fair point--and not incompatible with the broad point that shifting the distribution and revenue models of the industry was going to have weird, unpredictable, and often negative effects on the product itself (and the people who make it). But I think "a few sitcoms" (and procedurals) are all that have ever been successful in reruns, and with ad-supported tiers coming back to streaming I am not entirely pessimistic that a similar version of success can't be found.
There's so much stuff being produced now, and a million other distractions like social media, video games, extensive Substacks about dad thrillers and guys who buy the largest warehouse in the US, spending more time with friends and family post-COVID lockdown, I think I'm also much more discerning about what I'm going to spend time on.
I don't lazily just put on whatever in the background anymore (I'm 40 and we have kids so it's usually whatever they're watching), so most things need to be "appointment viewing" and so I gravitate to the more prestige stuff on HBO or shows like "Andor" which are more highbrow but in a pop culture context.
Full disclosure: my sole garbage guilty pleasure is the occasional 90 Day Fiancé to watch very dumb people flail across international borders and cultures.
This is definitely true. I watch way less TV in general than I used to because I'd rather just waste two hours with a bad movie than potentially waste eight hours with a bad TV show. But even though I also tend to gravitate toward the good prestige stuff I miss the cornucopia of good sitcoms, good police procedurals, and other network fluff you could put on while you folded laundry or whatever else.
The most recent TV showed I actually enjoyed was Poker Face, which has a kind of silly premise: What if Natasha Lyonne was Colombo, and often even sillier plots and characters, but has a genuine love for the premise and characters, and real craft in production, direction, editing, etc. I don’t know enough technical stuff to explain why, but I can tell when the people involved took the time to make sure it was done right, as opposed to merely done.
I don’t watch a lot of TV for time reasons, but another recentish show I watched was Foundation, which is gorgeously rendered and looks like prestige money in every shot, and is done with absolute contempt for everything involved except Lee Pace’s abs.
1.it sounds like the agent is implying that writers are flat out refusing jobs because they’ll only take prestige jobs? That seems ludicrous to me. Writers aren’t the ones making the decisions on what gets made
2.There is one glaring example of a successful middling show on a streaming network...Manifest. And my understanding is that it’s pretty successful (and yes I know Netflix took it from another network but does that even matter at this point)
I started off disagreeing with you and then somewhere about halfway through I started agreeing. How did you do that? ;-)
My only comment is that this is the same across all fields of endeavor. The CEOs are there to optimize shareholder value - that is literally their legally required job. Everything else is secondary. Because Wall St. is so voracious and myopic that means CEOs are always going to favor short term profits over long term success.
So, it's nothing to do with why entertainment executives love or hate entertainment.
CEO's love share prices. And thus the root problem is to do with every company (movie, cars, supermarkets - whatever!) wanting/needing to be listed on the NYSE and once there then having to dance to the tune of the financial prognosticators who determine share value based on what's happening the next quarter.
Using your Honda Civic example - the Japanese car companies of old had a longer time horizon than their US coutnerparts. Thus, a Honda Civic was better than a Ford Escort. Not because a Japanese engineer or lineworker was better or worse than their US counterpart. They simply were given more time to improve things.
It's just another example of how capitalism ultimately breaks things. If you're pro-capitalism, you'll say that market forces will correct things because we'll only pay for "quality" not "quantity". I'm not so sure!
Remember when streaming came out? One could make the argument it was popular because cable became "100 channels of crap with nothing to watch". Fast forward a few years and to get all the "quality" I want to watch (and that's my own personal definition of quality) I have to subscribe to a half-dozen or more streaming services. And each of those services is 90% crap to 10% quality.
Good callout re the Japanese automakers vs American and their focus on quality and not taking for granted their customer (or in this case, audience) to build and sell a product that was well-made.
And you're 100% correct that we have just recreated the cable TV model with balkanized packages to get the things you actually want to watch, but now the studios/networks are trying to own the entire piece and it's crashing miserably. Sean McNulty from The Ankler/The Wakeup had a great writeup last month on the dire economics that the studios have rushed themselves into in their frantic rush to go all in on building streaming platforms:
In fairness to execs (can't believe I just wrote that), the batshit instability of their corporate structures is contributing to this phenomenon.
There is recognition at the streamers that the library material doing the best for them is stuff like Criminal Minds. I sold a show to ABC a couple years ago called "Will Trent" and they were very eager for us to develop a "case of the week" franchise for it because the plan was to archive the episodes on Hulu. It's also made ABC a lot more amenable to re-running the episodes on broadcast, alongside things like Abbott. It's nice. And I think it's a good show - my co-showrunner and I tried really hard to capture the feeling of earlier-era shows like NYPD BLUE and ER, where there was enough screen time devoted to the characters that they weren't just messengers for the week's episodic story. It's doing well for Disney, and it's a great gig for those of us making it.
But the coda to all of this is that there's lots of noise out there about Disney selling Hulu. What's that going to mean for the strategy surrounding my show? Who knows. I'm so upset on behalf of the teams at Disney that have spent years figuring out the best way to create and market programming that can run across broadcast and streaming. I'm sure they'll pivot, as we all do, but the future is so murky, and the executives at both the studio and the network are still recovering from massive layoffs and restructuring. Oh yeah, and we're striking.
This is not to negate anything in your essay, which was a great read. Just adding context because I have a lot of free time on my hands. I agree that there are a lot of people out there - creatives and executives - who want to find a way to re-embrace mass-market entertainment in the streaming era. And I vehemently agree that mass-market entertainment can be Good, and a lot of "prestige" entertainment is noodle brained. But the entire business has been merged & aquisitioned into this unsteerable behemoth that still thinks it's 2014.
One final thought - I will say that the streamers' strategy of making their libraries a test kitchen for questioning all the assumptions of TV storytelling has opened up the doors to a lot of creators who never would've gotten hired on Nash Bridges or CSI: Miami, and that's cool. TV is hard, whether it's a broadcast cop show or Barry, and there will always be stinkers that make it to air no matter what the development targets are. I think it's fun that there was an era of business competition that caused these companies to fund some incredibly niche ideas. But now it seems like the next project of the industry is figuring out how to integrate the best ideas of the niche era into a sustainable business model.
I'll be over here while someone else figures that out.
Ah man, I've been meaning to try Will Trent specifically because it looks like it hits that satisfyingly well-made episodic-procedural sweet spot that I'm clearly jonesing for.
I agree there's absolutely an optimistic case to made here--that we can meld some of the positive developments of the Peak TV era with the somewhat more rigorous processes of what came before it. But as you say, the corporate behemoths in which the executives (good and bad) are trying to operate seem to have no real sense of what they want or what they're supposed to be doing. (Based on my own experience Apple sometimes seems to forget that it even *has* a streaming service.) I sure hope someone figures it out because tech already blew up journalism and I'll be mad if it blows up the industry I tried to leave journalism for, too.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately that an under-discussed factor in what makes a lot of modern “prestige TV” so mediocre is that at some point a switch flipped and the episodic series format, which was once considered a relatively undesirable Hollywood backwater, became the highly desirable medium to work in while, at pretty much the exact same time, mid-budget feature film more or less ceased to be viable. Coupled with the rise of streaming economics, these trends have meant that a lot of solid story ideas that 15 years ago would have been conceived as closed-ended features must now be spread thin over 8-10 episodes and treated as open-ended storylines with the potential for multiple seasons. I’m pretty hard pressed to think of modern multi-season shows (even good ones, like, say, Yellowjackets) that don’t feel like they’re either too padded out to reach series length or start to lose focus and momentum in their second season. As you point out, some of the best shows of the 2000s “prestige” era were created by people who cut their teeth in network TV and knew how to keep an open-ended narrative going while managing to raise the stakes each and every season (Breaking Bad is such a prime example here). Very few “prestige” shows today feel that way to me, personally.
This critic essentially makes the same point in this review of “The Crowded Room”
“A far more concise — one might even say movie-length — version of the story would burn through much less goodwill en route to a modest payoff. Instead, we get a protracted portrait of a mind that turns out far from beautiful.”
Nice piece! I haven't watched many of the older classic TV series mentioned here, but the post helped verbalize what had frustrated me about an NYTimes article "Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences," which essentially said that the economic ails around cinema was that people aren't going to see high-quality, prestige films, using Tár as a case study. Essentially, the article was arguing the opposite of the executives quoted here: the piece claimed that Hollywood is cranking out amazing movies like Tar, but that people only want to see e.g. Marvel and Fast and Furious. The article was making the same error you're pointing out here: that maybe these "prestige" films just aren't that great, and that's why people don't see them, and more generally, that the industry is highly removed from their audience.
Yeah I personally liked it as well. But, I think it's unsurprising that it didn't fare particularly well in the box office. It is an unabashedly high-brow movie, and by the nature of the subject matter, will necessarily only attract viewers who enjoy heady arthouse film. So, I don't think it makes a very good case study for an argument of the form "we keep making great movies but no one sees them." Compare that to a movie like Dog Day Afternoon (as a random example because I recently rewatched it), which can be seen as a sophisticated character study of a narcissist, but can also be enjoyed as a simple bank heist film. Tár however, can only be enjoyed in terms of its themes and challenging subject matter, there's no middle-brow level on which to view it.
Yeah, I don't think there was any realistic chance of Tár becoming a huge commercial smash. Long runtime, unabashedly highbrow subject matter, elliptical plot, unlikeable protagonist.
I grew up with The Sopranos / The Wire / Deadwood and later got into Mad Men and Breaking Bad (slightly worse but still good), and I’ve always found other “prestige” TV more or less unwatchable, (half-hour comedies, British stuff and New Twin Peaks excepted). Yet there have been *so many* clearly talented people making the stuff, and so much money was sloshing around in search of prestige! Why doesn’t prestige have the success rate of 90s low budget independent film? Was I the problem?
Then White Lotus came along and it was actually good, as good as a really good 90s independent film like Election or Metropolitan. Good prestige TV can be made. But why haven’t they made ten shows as good as White Lotus in the past decade?
Late comment is late, but, how many people does it actually take to run TCM? They don't need to produce new content, they don't even need to sell adds! I'm picturing a small town radio station with one person scheduling the content and one person keeping the books, and that's it. Clearly that is not the case, since there were more people to fire, but I'm not sure what everyone is doing?
"Over time, the expensive signifiers of prestige TV — the movie stars, the set pieces, the cinematography — became so familiar and easy to appropriate that it could take viewers six or seven hours to realize the show they were watching was a fugazi."
I didn't know it until now but is so true! I don't start a lot of shows because it takes me practically a full season to know if I like it. I'm slow to get off the train. This explains a lot.
Also 24 is a great example of the issue you talk about here. That was just a damn good mass audience show. New actors/characters were rotating in and out every season, yet the show remained consistently good.
24 was so stupid and so evil but so entertaining and fun
It also had an amazing theme remix by Armin Van Buuren: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HU3-vM7381Q
I mean, I don't know, I think I'd rather live in a world where a bunch of people who made four good seasons of a show keep getting paid for an extra five bad seasons (that people still seem interested in watching) than the world where people don't even get a chance to make a second or third season
great stuff! your point about good network tv vs trash "prestige" is why i like Bosch and wish more streaming services went for a show like it; it's a network show in all but format and platform, with its seasons having clearly defined start and end points with a somewhat higher level of production. it's like an elevated law and order, the ultimate network tv show.
Bosch is a great example!
As a writer and director who’s trying to break into tv, holy shit this is so sanity inducing to read. I really agree about lack of care and attention being the underlying problem in making mid content. My beliefs about that are just from about seeing who actually leads these teams, and talking with producers and people who fit well in the system. There was a profile of Bella Bajaria last year that showed she’s just really only able or interested in saying, “yes, great! Keep going!” There was no real engagement with the content itself, just a drive to get more of it. And that is definitely what has changed.
All the pitch and general meetings I’ve had lately with streamers and broadcasters who are being forced to transition to streaming are emphasizing how little they want dramedies and the other prestige formats, and how much they are betting on straightforward comedies and procedurals. But like you point out, it’s not just about the changing form away from prestige - it’s motivated by a need to spend their resources more wisely.
And that makes sense, yknow? From a risk management standpoint, you gotta take surer bets. But the thing that’s more quietly stated is that they have so much more time, as dev execs. They can read scripts now; the norm previously was that you gotta just give them a deck and maybe a bible and get a dev green light on that. They now have time for feedback. And I think the good ones who do give a shit about film and TV are gonna thrive in this new environment, where less is being made, and their capacity to really bring their skills and experience to bear will actually be fun for them and good for the fewer things that are getting made.
Kinda terrifying to navigate as a new writer. But maybe a good thing for people in it who are more into the eternal values of tv: being non-precious and collaborative because fuck, you gotta get something done!
It seems weird to think that TV needs more [good, involved, experienced, sensitive] meddling executives, but ... it kind of does?
I think you're misreading this quote: “Back-end payments existed because Europeans were willing to watch our garbage, and Americans were willing to watch repeats of that garbage on cable at 11 at night.”
The point of the "11 at night" part isn't that people don't watch trash, it's that they don't watch reruns (outside of a few sitcoms). This is been true, more or less, since TiVo came along but streaming has supercharged it, and without reruns there isn't a secondary revenue stream (i.e. a second set of ads run against the rerun that is distinct from the ads run against the first run) to fund the residuals. This goes to why seasons used to be 24 seasons long and emphasized consistency: they were made for people who were going to miss some episodes. Again, that's not a problem now, people are completists because you don't just skip episode eight if you had a PTA meeting that night. So the same person that is watching 8 episodes of The Bear might only have watched eight episodes of Ally McBeal in any given seasons. Except now that person can be serviced with an eight episode season whereas before you needed to make more episodes so that when they happened to tune in there was something new for them to watch.
This is a fair point--and not incompatible with the broad point that shifting the distribution and revenue models of the industry was going to have weird, unpredictable, and often negative effects on the product itself (and the people who make it). But I think "a few sitcoms" (and procedurals) are all that have ever been successful in reruns, and with ad-supported tiers coming back to streaming I am not entirely pessimistic that a similar version of success can't be found.
JT the tortured writer in the Sopranos also wrote for Nash Bridges. Christopher bragged about it to Lauren Bacall who replied "I don't know him."
There's so much stuff being produced now, and a million other distractions like social media, video games, extensive Substacks about dad thrillers and guys who buy the largest warehouse in the US, spending more time with friends and family post-COVID lockdown, I think I'm also much more discerning about what I'm going to spend time on.
I don't lazily just put on whatever in the background anymore (I'm 40 and we have kids so it's usually whatever they're watching), so most things need to be "appointment viewing" and so I gravitate to the more prestige stuff on HBO or shows like "Andor" which are more highbrow but in a pop culture context.
Full disclosure: my sole garbage guilty pleasure is the occasional 90 Day Fiancé to watch very dumb people flail across international borders and cultures.
This is definitely true. I watch way less TV in general than I used to because I'd rather just waste two hours with a bad movie than potentially waste eight hours with a bad TV show. But even though I also tend to gravitate toward the good prestige stuff I miss the cornucopia of good sitcoms, good police procedurals, and other network fluff you could put on while you folded laundry or whatever else.
The most recent TV showed I actually enjoyed was Poker Face, which has a kind of silly premise: What if Natasha Lyonne was Colombo, and often even sillier plots and characters, but has a genuine love for the premise and characters, and real craft in production, direction, editing, etc. I don’t know enough technical stuff to explain why, but I can tell when the people involved took the time to make sure it was done right, as opposed to merely done.
I don’t watch a lot of TV for time reasons, but another recentish show I watched was Foundation, which is gorgeously rendered and looks like prestige money in every shot, and is done with absolute contempt for everything involved except Lee Pace’s abs.
A couple comments:
1.it sounds like the agent is implying that writers are flat out refusing jobs because they’ll only take prestige jobs? That seems ludicrous to me. Writers aren’t the ones making the decisions on what gets made
2.There is one glaring example of a successful middling show on a streaming network...Manifest. And my understanding is that it’s pretty successful (and yes I know Netflix took it from another network but does that even matter at this point)
I started off disagreeing with you and then somewhere about halfway through I started agreeing. How did you do that? ;-)
My only comment is that this is the same across all fields of endeavor. The CEOs are there to optimize shareholder value - that is literally their legally required job. Everything else is secondary. Because Wall St. is so voracious and myopic that means CEOs are always going to favor short term profits over long term success.
So, it's nothing to do with why entertainment executives love or hate entertainment.
CEO's love share prices. And thus the root problem is to do with every company (movie, cars, supermarkets - whatever!) wanting/needing to be listed on the NYSE and once there then having to dance to the tune of the financial prognosticators who determine share value based on what's happening the next quarter.
Using your Honda Civic example - the Japanese car companies of old had a longer time horizon than their US coutnerparts. Thus, a Honda Civic was better than a Ford Escort. Not because a Japanese engineer or lineworker was better or worse than their US counterpart. They simply were given more time to improve things.
It's just another example of how capitalism ultimately breaks things. If you're pro-capitalism, you'll say that market forces will correct things because we'll only pay for "quality" not "quantity". I'm not so sure!
Remember when streaming came out? One could make the argument it was popular because cable became "100 channels of crap with nothing to watch". Fast forward a few years and to get all the "quality" I want to watch (and that's my own personal definition of quality) I have to subscribe to a half-dozen or more streaming services. And each of those services is 90% crap to 10% quality.
Progress?
Good callout re the Japanese automakers vs American and their focus on quality and not taking for granted their customer (or in this case, audience) to build and sell a product that was well-made.
And you're 100% correct that we have just recreated the cable TV model with balkanized packages to get the things you actually want to watch, but now the studios/networks are trying to own the entire piece and it's crashing miserably. Sean McNulty from The Ankler/The Wakeup had a great writeup last month on the dire economics that the studios have rushed themselves into in their frantic rush to go all in on building streaming platforms:
https://theankler.com/p/how-hollywood-killed-its-own-golden
All this talk about Nash Bridges has me mourning the fact that modern shows have no Cheech Marin.
They've got LL Cool J by the damn boatload though.
In fairness to execs (can't believe I just wrote that), the batshit instability of their corporate structures is contributing to this phenomenon.
There is recognition at the streamers that the library material doing the best for them is stuff like Criminal Minds. I sold a show to ABC a couple years ago called "Will Trent" and they were very eager for us to develop a "case of the week" franchise for it because the plan was to archive the episodes on Hulu. It's also made ABC a lot more amenable to re-running the episodes on broadcast, alongside things like Abbott. It's nice. And I think it's a good show - my co-showrunner and I tried really hard to capture the feeling of earlier-era shows like NYPD BLUE and ER, where there was enough screen time devoted to the characters that they weren't just messengers for the week's episodic story. It's doing well for Disney, and it's a great gig for those of us making it.
But the coda to all of this is that there's lots of noise out there about Disney selling Hulu. What's that going to mean for the strategy surrounding my show? Who knows. I'm so upset on behalf of the teams at Disney that have spent years figuring out the best way to create and market programming that can run across broadcast and streaming. I'm sure they'll pivot, as we all do, but the future is so murky, and the executives at both the studio and the network are still recovering from massive layoffs and restructuring. Oh yeah, and we're striking.
This is not to negate anything in your essay, which was a great read. Just adding context because I have a lot of free time on my hands. I agree that there are a lot of people out there - creatives and executives - who want to find a way to re-embrace mass-market entertainment in the streaming era. And I vehemently agree that mass-market entertainment can be Good, and a lot of "prestige" entertainment is noodle brained. But the entire business has been merged & aquisitioned into this unsteerable behemoth that still thinks it's 2014.
One final thought - I will say that the streamers' strategy of making their libraries a test kitchen for questioning all the assumptions of TV storytelling has opened up the doors to a lot of creators who never would've gotten hired on Nash Bridges or CSI: Miami, and that's cool. TV is hard, whether it's a broadcast cop show or Barry, and there will always be stinkers that make it to air no matter what the development targets are. I think it's fun that there was an era of business competition that caused these companies to fund some incredibly niche ideas. But now it seems like the next project of the industry is figuring out how to integrate the best ideas of the niche era into a sustainable business model.
I'll be over here while someone else figures that out.
Ah man, I've been meaning to try Will Trent specifically because it looks like it hits that satisfyingly well-made episodic-procedural sweet spot that I'm clearly jonesing for.
I agree there's absolutely an optimistic case to made here--that we can meld some of the positive developments of the Peak TV era with the somewhat more rigorous processes of what came before it. But as you say, the corporate behemoths in which the executives (good and bad) are trying to operate seem to have no real sense of what they want or what they're supposed to be doing. (Based on my own experience Apple sometimes seems to forget that it even *has* a streaming service.) I sure hope someone figures it out because tech already blew up journalism and I'll be mad if it blows up the industry I tried to leave journalism for, too.
WEDNESDAY hit some nostalgic buttons for me, but I wouldn't call it "good," exactly.
And honestly, if I added up the hours of TV over the past six months, a lot of it was spent spelunking Tubi, which is nothing but "old garbage."
I’ve been thinking a lot lately that an under-discussed factor in what makes a lot of modern “prestige TV” so mediocre is that at some point a switch flipped and the episodic series format, which was once considered a relatively undesirable Hollywood backwater, became the highly desirable medium to work in while, at pretty much the exact same time, mid-budget feature film more or less ceased to be viable. Coupled with the rise of streaming economics, these trends have meant that a lot of solid story ideas that 15 years ago would have been conceived as closed-ended features must now be spread thin over 8-10 episodes and treated as open-ended storylines with the potential for multiple seasons. I’m pretty hard pressed to think of modern multi-season shows (even good ones, like, say, Yellowjackets) that don’t feel like they’re either too padded out to reach series length or start to lose focus and momentum in their second season. As you point out, some of the best shows of the 2000s “prestige” era were created by people who cut their teeth in network TV and knew how to keep an open-ended narrative going while managing to raise the stakes each and every season (Breaking Bad is such a prime example here). Very few “prestige” shows today feel that way to me, personally.
Lots of people would rather write movies than TV--but there's a lot more TV out there than movies!
This critic essentially makes the same point in this review of “The Crowded Room”
“A far more concise — one might even say movie-length — version of the story would burn through much less goodwill en route to a modest payoff. Instead, we get a protracted portrait of a mind that turns out far from beautiful.”
https://variety.com/2023/tv/tv-reviews/the-crowded-room-review-tom-holland-1235639007/
Nice piece! I haven't watched many of the older classic TV series mentioned here, but the post helped verbalize what had frustrated me about an NYTimes article "Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences," which essentially said that the economic ails around cinema was that people aren't going to see high-quality, prestige films, using Tár as a case study. Essentially, the article was arguing the opposite of the executives quoted here: the piece claimed that Hollywood is cranking out amazing movies like Tar, but that people only want to see e.g. Marvel and Fast and Furious. The article was making the same error you're pointing out here: that maybe these "prestige" films just aren't that great, and that's why people don't see them, and more generally, that the industry is highly removed from their audience.
Tár is amazing though
Yeah I personally liked it as well. But, I think it's unsurprising that it didn't fare particularly well in the box office. It is an unabashedly high-brow movie, and by the nature of the subject matter, will necessarily only attract viewers who enjoy heady arthouse film. So, I don't think it makes a very good case study for an argument of the form "we keep making great movies but no one sees them." Compare that to a movie like Dog Day Afternoon (as a random example because I recently rewatched it), which can be seen as a sophisticated character study of a narcissist, but can also be enjoyed as a simple bank heist film. Tár however, can only be enjoyed in terms of its themes and challenging subject matter, there's no middle-brow level on which to view it.
Yeah, I don't think there was any realistic chance of Tár becoming a huge commercial smash. Long runtime, unabashedly highbrow subject matter, elliptical plot, unlikeable protagonist.
Tár's failure to make money is so sad. I saw it in a packed theater (...at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) and everybody was laughing their ass off.
All the other films mentioned in that NYT article sounded extremely tedious to me but Tár was really something.
I grew up with The Sopranos / The Wire / Deadwood and later got into Mad Men and Breaking Bad (slightly worse but still good), and I’ve always found other “prestige” TV more or less unwatchable, (half-hour comedies, British stuff and New Twin Peaks excepted). Yet there have been *so many* clearly talented people making the stuff, and so much money was sloshing around in search of prestige! Why doesn’t prestige have the success rate of 90s low budget independent film? Was I the problem?
Then White Lotus came along and it was actually good, as good as a really good 90s independent film like Election or Metropolitan. Good prestige TV can be made. But why haven’t they made ten shows as good as White Lotus in the past decade?
Late comment is late, but, how many people does it actually take to run TCM? They don't need to produce new content, they don't even need to sell adds! I'm picturing a small town radio station with one person scheduling the content and one person keeping the books, and that's it. Clearly that is not the case, since there were more people to fire, but I'm not sure what everyone is doing?