Is golden age beginning to tarnish?
Too much of a good thing can leave beleaguered viewers choking on abundance
Have you seen True Detective? What about the climax of Mad Men? Wasn’t The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt brilliant? You must have watched every season of The Wire and The Sopranos by now. The Walking Dead spinoff looks good and Martin Scorsese’s new music business drama Vinyl is generating lots of buzz. Just make sure you are up to date on Orange Is The New Black.
In what is widely acknowledged to be a golden age for television, it might seem churlish to complain there is simply too much of it being made. Yet at the Edinburgh International Television Festival last week, executives were debating whether there are signs the American-led flowering of television drama over the past 15 years might be starting to wilt.
“We are choking on our own abundance,” said John Landgraf, chief executive of FX, which has been behind a good share of acclaimed box-set television including Damages and Fargo. “It’s like winning a pie-eating contest every day,” he said.
Landgraf has emerged as television’s chief doomsayer, arguing the 400 scripted series commissioned in the U.S. this year is too many. It is, he believes, a bubble that cannot continue to inflate amid the changing behaviour of audiences and shifting economics of the industry.
Delivering his dark predictions to an audience of people who make television for a living, Landgraf claimed the industry has had too much of a good thing.
“You reach something called the paradox of choice,” he said. “If you give people too many choices it breeds discontent because ultimately it’s very hard to pay attention to all the choices and it’s essentially work to sort through them all. And whenever you choose something you are un-choosing something else so you get this big sense of malaise that even when you’re watching something great you could be watching something even greater. Television has become work on some level. It’s laborious to try to pay attention to all the great television.”
Undeniably, the industry has enjoyed rapid growth since HBO launched the first season of the Sopranos in 1999. Budgets have swollen in tandem with the ambitions of those who make TV shows. In the past five years, the number of scripted series commissioned in the U.S. has almost doubled.
For Landgraf, there is now too much money chasing a limited amount of attention.
At the same time, the arrival of on-demand services from Amazon and Netflix, means many viewers also have access to vast libraries of older series. Soon, there will be a reckoning, claims Landgraf.
“I see business eating the creative tail right now,” he said. “There’s a feeding frenzy and a sense of great amounts of money to be made. Ultimately all industries over- expand and then consolidate.
“What I’m saying is I think we’re heading for a time of some level of crisis and contraction.”
Plenty of television executives disagree with the diagnosis. Also at the Edinburgh International Television Festival was David Nevins, the senior creative executive at Showtime, the premium cable channel behind Homeland and Dexter. He is a friend and former colleague of Landgraf’s, but believes the FX chief is calling “peak television” too early. “I don’t buy into it,” he said. “There is never enough great TV. There may be lot of good TV, but people are always looking for that one new thing that is great.
“What is the optimal number of shows? I think it is changing but I don’t think we’ve hit peak.”