Overfed, Undernourished

Has Peak TV Already Peaked? 

American television has had to compete with the deranged reality show that is the Trump era, and now we’ve got a million viewing options and a lot less worth watching.
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Illustration by Vanity Fair; Images courtesy of Showtime, Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. 

On the occasion of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Masha Gessen wrote an essay called “The Styrofoam Presidency,” deploying the 376-year-old term kakistocracy, meaning “government by the worst people.” Gessen regarded Trump’s inauguration cake—a partially Styrofoam facsimile of Barack Obama’s—as the kakistocrat’s ultimate aesthetic feat: “Not only does it not achieve excellence: it does not even see the point of excellence.”

I’ve returned to the essay again and again over the last four years. Trump is a TV phenomenon, a savvy manipulator of America’s most populist medium. His reign has purposefully taken up the compulsive absorption, backstabbing drama, and theatrical cruelty of entertainment. What political machinations could be more gripping, or have higher stakes, than the daily Trumpian assault on democracy? What reality show has had more venal cowards, more selfish narcissists, than this administration? The daily clown show cuts into television’s bandwidth, both figuratively and literally, occupying space in the national conversation, and therefore our brains, that might be instead filled with, among many other things, the heir to The Sopranos.

Even without the terrible daily soap opera, American TV in general has gotten positively kakistocratic. This may sound surprising, given how many options are available to consumers, and—especially in the pandemic era—how thoroughly television has dominated our available attention. To be sure, the sheer amount of television available now means there are gems floating around. (Go watch Pen15!) But we make roughly two and a half times more television now than we did in 2009; that ought to translate to two and a half times as many great shows. Yet to my eye, as a television critic routinely interrogated about what great new thing is coming around the corner, good TV is worryingly scarce.

While our television technology has gotten better and better at meeting the consumer—platforms offer archived films and classic reruns, use bespoke algorithms (well, and surveillance) to tailor recommendations, and populate content on multiple devices—the average scripted show has plummeted in quality.

Streaming prioritizes a bunch of conditions that bloat, dilute, and cheapen television, turning it into a chunk of hours-long content rather than a chaptered story with discrete parts. Netflix, the pioneer of the streaming show, has referred to their first seasons as the “pilot” seasons, which expands the idea of a pilot episode into an 8- or 10- or 12-hour test balloon. This might be why Greg Daniels’s latest comedy Space Force so disappointed critics; the season had some charm, but felt so experimental and tentative that it was ultimately unfunny and toothless. Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has gotten more mind-numbing with each successive season, sacrificing characterization for several hours of commitment to a candy-colored retro vibe. And when was the last time a Ryan Murphy show sucked you into an obsessive viewing marathon? It certainly can’t have been the abominable Ratched, which had so few ideas that even the most positive reviews acknowledged that its style towered over its substance. HBO Max debuted with the bland, saccharine Anna Kendrick comedy Love Life. Showtime tried to wow with the ripped-from-the-headlines The Comey Rule, a star-studded, corny, self-serious relitigation of the 2016 election. Hulu bet big on the splashy Little Fires Everywhere, which ended up playing like an after-school special. These shows certainly aren’t all bad. But like the majority of series that have been vying for our attention over the last year or two, they’re plagued with problems: a slipshod affect that indicates a rush to the screen; too many episodes and not enough story; a cast and a mood, but no actual plot.

What American TV production seems to be really good at is making mediocre filler. (This is especially true for unscripted television, which racked up 15 seasons—200 episodes—of the ridiculous cash-wagering cooking competition Cutthroat Kitchen.) We live in a vast universe of mere “content”; it’s fine, but it exists primarily to take up space. The platform’s imperative is to fill hours with a diverse array of material. The business strategy is quantity.

It’s still possible to make a great streaming show, but creators have to work against the platforms’ incentives, not with them. Only some creators have the wherewithal. When they don’t, foreign shows take over: the imports Fleabag and Schitt’s Creek won back-to-back Emmys for outstanding comedy. (Wasn’t American comedy supposed to get better in the Trump era?) Netflix imported the riveting dramas Babylon Berlin and Borgen to the delight of critics, and rallied loyal fans around the period Korean-language drama Kingdom, which is just one of many K-dramas available on streaming services. Streamers don’t have to make American TV good; they just have to deliver good TV to Americans.

And Americans, in the last few years, have become an increasingly cash-poor audience. In 2011, development economist Guy Standing coined the term precariat to describe a global working class defined by unstable, “flexible” hours, lack of job security, mounting debt, and dwindling access to the protections of the past, like unions, pensions, and reliable wages. This year, in her book Can’t Even, Anne Helen Petersen describes the phenomenon from a different angle, identifying millennials—the oldest of whom are now nearly 40—as victims of systemic burnout. However you want to define it, the result is the same: a growing underclass of the unsupported, isolated, and financially strained. These are the consumers so well-served by our streaming platforms—people with fewer and fewer resources.

After all, almost any content seems like a bargain if you get it cheap, and in bulk. Surely, a lot of mediocrity, and a few hidden gems, is worth $6, $8, $10, or $15 a month? Particularly if you’re housebound in a pandemic? You might waste some time, but you won’t be wasting it on 150 cable channels you never watch, or $8 popcorn at a movie theater while watching the sequel to a prequel to a reboot. The value goes up if you have kids that need entertainment, or an enthusiasm for poorly produced (but quite educational!) documentary series. Along the way, though, quality becomes kind of a red herring. The streamers themselves could try to make their programming better, but they are busy serving up the volume they’ve promised—and returning profits to their shareholders. And those subscriptions start to seem expensive when you need seven of them.

The 2020 Emmys suggested that TV’s awards structure is heading toward the bifurcated structure film has managed for a long time—an uneasy balance between profit-producing blockbusters and clout-chasing arty fare. On one hand, the Emmys successfully sifted quality out of the deluge, selecting Schitt’s Creek, Succession, and Watchmen—all good shows!—for multiple accolades. But it was impossible to ignore how thoroughly those shows reflected the preoccupations of a rather narrow subset of the population. Schitt’s and Succession offer two very different tonal takes on the dysfunctional, rich, white family, and Watchmen so neatly dovetailed with the Academy’s collective white guilt that it obscured the fact that the limited series was developed by a white showrunner—and that it calibrated a widely understood Black experience for a naive white audience. Those shows succeeded by catering to the elite. And, I should add, that at a moment when including new and underrepresented voices matters more to Hollywood than ever before, a working class trapped in poverty has even less access to the industry.

During the Trump administration—and the pandemic that it’s exacerbated—real lives and livelihoods have been on the line. So the degradation of our aesthetics speaks to a bigger problem: a consumer caught in a vampirically unequal economy. The industry is serving the hell out of them. But in the process, it’s turned quality into an option. For a country that exports so much media—that makes so much money in the process—this is a problem with tentacles.

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