ROB LONG: How Watching Television Became a Chore.
Watching TV has never been so baffling. You don’t just walk in the house and flop down in front of the TV and start flipping around anymore. Watching television in 2024 requires what psychologists and self-help gurus call intentionality. You have to know what you’re looking for and exactly where to find it, which means the entire process usually starts with a Google search. We’re all familiar with today’s Television Catechism. It goes: What was that show we wanted to see, again? Followed by: Which one of the thingy’s is it on? And ends in an exasperated: Do we even get that one?
If you’re at my house, the Anglo-Saxon vulgarism for sexual intercourse is inserted before the words “show,” “see,” “on,” “get,” and “one” in the above.
It’s also possible you will find yourself re-inputting a forgotten password, which will inspire more profanity.
And then there’s the quiet anxiety all of this programming evokes. “I’m way behind on my TV stuff,” a friend of mine told me recently. “I need to catch up on The Crown and I’m working my way through The Gilded Age. I tried to add Better Call Saul to my list because I haven’t seen any of it and I feel bad about it, but I don’t want to keep adding shows to watch and then failing at keeping up with them.”
Working my way through. Way behind. Feel bad. Need to catch up. Failing. These are the phrases people use now for watching TV, an activity that used to require basically zero mental or physical effort. Watching television shows is now showing up on “To Do” lists, like tax returns and colonoscopies.
How we got from idly flipping around the dial to binge-watching The White Lotus is the subject of Peter Biskind’s riveting and juicy book, Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV. Biskind is the author of several books about the entertainment business—his Easy Riders, Raging Bulls remains a definitive history of Hollywood in the 1960s and ’70s—and this one is just as much fun. It’s sweeping and gossipy and analytic all at once, and speaking as someone who was present for a few of the arguments and crises he describes, it’s dead-on accurate.
Exit quote:
If you think “guts, guile, and greed” upended TV during the fat years, just wait until the sequel, Pandora’s Box II: Revenge of the Shareholders. It’ll be even gutsier, greedier, and with more guile—in other words, it might end up being a pretty good television series. If, that is, you can find it.
Read the whole thing.
And then there are the actual shows that were created first by the cable networks, and then the streaming platforms ever since the Sopranos debuted on HBO in 1999, a glut of product so large, even Mr. Creosote would blanche at taking it all in. As Sonny Bunch, then of the Weekly Standard (before their own digital demise) asked in 2018: Overload: Will any shows from the Golden Age of TV endure?
The flood of television programming from Netflix et al. since 2013, and the shotgun-blast manner in which new seasons are released, have combined to make it virtually impossible to keep up with everything worth watching. As recently as 15 years ago, a discerning TV watcher only needed to keep tabs on a handful of shows—a Sunday-night drama from HBO or AMC or Showtime; a Tuesday-night drama and a Thursday-night comedy from FX or maybe a broadcast network. But now it feels like there are nigh on infinite offerings from a nearly limitless number of channels. With thousands of hours of new TV coming out every year and an increasingly fractured marketplace demanding customers keep track of several different streaming services, how do we keep the truly excellent programming from being lost in the flood of mediocrity?
In retrospect, those days really did seem like another “Golden Age of TV,” complete with the capital letters in the phrase. 2024? Not so much: Streamers Want You To Dumb Down Your Film and TV Ideas: It’s hard to follow the plot if you’re not paying attention!
I think we can all admit that sometimes when we’re watching TV at home, we have our phones out at the same time. After a long day of picketing, I like to toss on Cheers and check my email. It happens. But when I sit down to watch a movie, to really study a story (like I did with the Cheers pilot), I devote all my attention to the screen when I can.
However, streamers aren’t making shows or movies for that level of thinking anymore, or, at least, they’re trying to be cognizant of that fact. Streamers are advocating for stories that you can understand while only paying half attention.
Today, I came across this amazing interview with Justine Bateman in The Hollywood Reporter. For those of you who don’t know, Justine Bateman is a writer, director, and producer. Recently, she contributed her expertise as an AI consultant for SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee.
Bateman began her career in Hollywood with an acclaimed and Emmy-nominated portrayal of Mallory Keaton on the TV show Family Ties.
In her interview, Bateman discussed a range of ideas in Hollywood, but one quote about storytelling shook me to my core.
Bateman said, “I’ve heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that ‘This isn’t second screen enough.’ Meaning, the viewer’s primary screen is their phone and the laptop and they don’t want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off. I heard somebody use this term before: they want a ‘visual muzak.’ When showrunners are getting notes like that, are they able to do their best work? No.”
Even the execs who created that golden era aren’t immune from such interference: The Sopranos creator David Chase says the golden age of TV is over as writers like him are told to ‘dumb it down.’