Overload: Will any shows from the Golden Age of TV endure?

Wow, you don’t watch HBO either. Weird. That’s okay, there’s plenty of good stuff on basic cable. I know it’s a bit gauche to admit, but The Walking Dead and its spinoff Fear the Walking Dead are pretty entertaining. The good folks at AMC also have more substantial fare, like Breaking Bad-prequel Better Call Saul for us highbrows. The fact that The Americans hasn’t won all the Emmys for FX is practically a crime. At least Fargo has gotten the attention it deserves, and folks seem to love the anthologies American Horror Story and American Crime Story, Ryan Murphy’s mini-empire of campy crap. The new season of South Park over at Comedy Central really stuck it to Trump. And look, if you want to stick to the networks for some reason, the CW is cranking out a whole DC comic-book universe: You could spend months just catching up on Supergirl and The Flash and Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow.

No, none of these is to your liking? Well, Amazon Prime must have something for you. What about . . .

[Joker / Ralfgerard / Ullsteinbild / Getty]

If you sometimes feel overwhelmed by the amount of television out there—by the increasing number of shows being praised by your peers, by the cascade of critically acclaimed programming on the ever-enlarging expanse of channels and pay tiers and streaming services—you’re not alone. At the Television Critics Association’s winter meeting in January, John Landgraf, the CEO of FX, highlighted the ongoing explosion in scripted programming. According to a report on Landgraf’s speech in Variety, 2017 saw 487 scripted series air on networks, cable, pay cable, and streaming services—up from 455 in 2016, which was up from 422 in 2015. Only 153 of the 2017 series aired on network TV—ABC, NBC, etc.—while 175 were on basic cable. Streaming services are the biggest driver in the latest TV boom; outlets like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu accounted for another 117 series. HBO and the other premium cable channels made up the final 42.

“Overall, the total series output on television since 2002 has grown by 168 percent,” Variety reported. By way of comparison, America’s population is up about 13 percent in the same time. The number of hours in the day has remained static, at 24. Simply put: There’s vastly more content (to use a vulgarity that reduces art to a consumable but feels proper when describing the aforementioned torrent) than ever before—and that’s not including the ever-increasing number of feature films or video games that take hundreds of hours to play or YouTube channels making millionaires out of 6-year-old kids. The fragmented nature of our viewing habits means a TV show on a pay cable station can get by with a few hundred thousand viewers if critics like it and it pulls in awards; the biggest “hits” in the world of scripted entertainment are watched by less than 5 percent of the population, if we are to trust the ratings. Of course, with a plethora of viewing options—live airing, DVRed recording, streaming on TVs and laptops and iPhones—relying on something as prosaic as the Nielsen ratings to measure popularity is a mug’s game. We need to scan Google searches and Twitter trends and Facebook topics to see what’s really driving the conversation at any given time.

If you had told people 20 years ago that there would one day be too much TV worth watching, they would’ve either laughed or assumed you were some sort of dullard. But The Sopranos would debut in January 1999. HBO’s hit series combined sex and violence with Shakespearean power struggles and relatable family drama, inaugurating the medium’s age of the antihero, one in which upticks in sex and violence were accompanied by more complex and ambitious storytelling and sky-high production values. Many critics use that date to mark the beginning of the recent golden age of television, and it’s a sensible-enough starting point. But Landgraf’s decision to use 2002 as the point of comparison may make more sense. After all, HBO had been churning out original programming for decades—stand-up specials and sports programs and nudity-filled reality shows like Real Sex; mediocre sitcoms like Arli$$ and critically acclaimed ones like The Larry Sanders Show; lurid, pulpier fare like Oz—before David Chase’s gangster opus premiered. The Sopranos may have been the apotheosis of the network’s motto, “It’s not TV, it’s HBO,” but it wasn’t a revolution in and of itself.

It was FX’s show The Shield, which debuted in 2002, that truly altered the landscape. As Alan Sepinwall has pointed out, in its early years FX was mostly a dumping ground for syndicated programming: “If you wanted to watch M*A*S*H at 3 in the afternoon, or revisit the early days of NYPD Blue and The X-Files, FX was the place to go.” It wasn’t until The Shield came along—testing the boundaries of basic cable’s standards-and-practices units with near-nudity, heightened levels of violence, and raunchier-than-network language while capitalizing on the fact that, unlike HBO or Showtime, it was available for no extra charge—that the true explosion in TV occurred. After FX paved the way with The Shield, Rescue Me, and Nip/Tuck, AMC got into the game with Mad Men and Breaking Bad. And just like that, we were off to the races. If you want to know why the History Channel is currently airing a risqué show about Viking warriors, The Shield is as good a place as any to start.

But where to stop? It seems clear that the new golden age is over—the hit-to-miss ratio is simply too low now—but when did it end? Arguably 2013 is a good place to draw the curtain; as FX and basic cable were to 2002, so are Netflix and streaming to 2013. Consider, for starters, the impact Netflix had on Breaking Bad, the last truly great series of the new golden age. For its first four seasons, Vince Gilligan’s epic story of science-teacher-turned-meth-dealer Walter White was a reliably modest draw for AMC, generally garnering between one and two million viewers; only once, in the fourth-season premiere, did it nab more than two million sets of eyeballs. The first half of the fifth season, by contrast, saw audiences increase by 50 percent, to between two and three million viewers; the first seven episodes of the second half of the fifth (and final) season nearly doubled that figure, and the series finale doubled that again, pulling in an audience of 10 million.

Why the nearly tenfold increase between season one and series finale? Netflix. Breaking Bad found its legs not in its initial years and not in syndication but via streaming during season breaks, when audiences could sit down and binge-watch the critically acclaimed show they’d heard so much about in a few days or weeks, depending on how much they had to catch up on. “I think Netflix kept us on the air,” Gilligan said when the program won its first Emmy for best drama in 2013 (it would win a second in 2014). “I don’t think our show would have even lasted beyond season two. . . . It’s a new era in television and we’ve been very fortunate to reap the benefits.” A tiny cult hit grew into something (relatively) massive because it was available for instant viewing and became a must-watch for those interested in staying on the cutting edge of culture.

“Relatively” because, it is worth noting, even the surprisingly high ratings from Breaking Bad’s final season are well below what would have been considered “hits” in years past. To pick more or less at random a popular network show from recent history, Friends generally drew between 20 and 30 million viewers for new episodes. The Big Bang Theory draws about half that these days. The most popular program in scripted cable history, The Walking Dead, topped out at just over 17 million viewers but has cratered in recent seasons; most recent episodes of the show have garnered roughly a third that number of viewers. The point being, by historical standards these are all niche programs garnering modest audiences.

The year 2013 also saw the premiere of Netflix’s House of Cards and with it a new model for distributing shows: Unlike network channels or broadcast TV, which doled out their premier programming a week at a time for three months or so, Netflix released the whole season at once. This allowed viewers to watch shows at their own pace. And their own pace tended to mean “as fast as possible”; no one watching wanted to have the adventures of devious Democratic pol Frank Underwood spoiled for them, and lots of people wanted to talk about the show. “Bingeing”—a word previously succeeded by “purging” when it wasn’t used to describe drug consumption—finally took on a positive connotation. Netflix, theretofore best understood as a means to watch movies created by the studios, learned what FX and AMC before it had come to realize: To become indispensable to the content consumer, you had to be a content creator. For basic-cable executives that meant creating must-watch shows so customers wouldn’t cut the cord, and cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner would be forced to keep paying affiliate fees to air the networks. For Netflix, it meant unleashing a buzzy new program every month or two that had to be consumed all in one go so you could chat about it around the workplace watercooler—and its digital descendants, Twitter and Facebook—lest you feel left out.

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?

Today’s foremost television critics, Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, have begun answering that question over the last few years via a series of books. Sepinwall’s The

Revolution Was Televised (2012) is a must-read history of TV running from the debut of HBO’s Oz (an almost-forgotten trailblazer that deserves more respect than it has received) through AMC’s emergence as a power player with Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Seitz and Sepinwall have collected their recaps—brief critical summaries of TV episodes published online as quickly as possible after the episodes’ initial airings—of those two shows in, respectively, Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion (2015) and Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion (2017). The two critics are teaming up for a similar Sopranos collection, scheduled to hit shelves in January 2019.

Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall on Seth Meyers’s late-night show in 2016. [Lloyd Bishop / NBC / Getty]

Sepinwall and Seitz also joined forces for TV (The Book): Two Experts Pick the Greatest American Shows of All Time (2016), and that volume is of more interest to us here. In that book, the two most important thinkers about TV take on the tricky task of looking at several generations of an evolving art form and deciding not only which individual works deserve to be remembered for their excellence but also what criteria we should consider when making such a determination. Sepinwall and Seitz wrestle with a show’s consistency and innovation, its influence on the medium as a whole and its greatness at its peak, and the quality of its acting and storytelling. They contend with the problems all critics face when trying to figure out just what is worthy of passing on to our descendants for their edification (and entertainment)—when trying, that is, to determine a canon.

It is worth taking a moment to pause and consider what a canon is and how it takes shape. Outside of the religious context, a canon is a set of artistic or philosophical works recognized for their cultural authority. Although it was hardly the first, perhaps the best-known attempt to determine a canon for Western literature and philosophy was the Great Books project led by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler and published and sold by Encyclopædia Britannica starting in the 1950s. Dwight Macdonald, scourge of the middlebrow, noted how the physical scale of the project seemingly gave it figurative heft: “Simply issuing a list would have been enough if practicality were the only consideration, but a list can easily be revised, and it lacks the totemistic force of a five-foot, hundred-pound array of books.” The canon, in this commercialistic conception, is as much for display as it is for reading and discussing, an expanse of prose and poetry that stretches across the mantel.

The very concept of the canon is inherently exclusive—some works are in, some are out—and so some opponents argue that canon-talk reflects bias and power, while defenders of the canon insist that its fixity is vital to cultural transmission. But as John Searle put it in an essay for the New York Review of Books in 1990, at a time when fights over political correctness were roiling college campuses, “In my experience there never was, in fact, a fixed ‘canon’; there was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact are being constantly revised.” (Indeed, the makeup of even the Great Books set has changed over the years.)

In a 1994 book about the Western literary canon, Harold Bloom succinctly summarized the “true question” of the canon: “What shall the individual who still desires to read attempt to read, this late in history?” Bloom’s concern was with the primacy of aesthetic beauty as opposed to ideological imperatives; he believed it to be the responsibility of the critic to point people to what is best rather than what is most “important” in some political sense:

Yet in a 2013 essay for the New Yorker, Sam Sacks lamented that “artistic brilliance is no longer the most important determining factor” in what is considered a classic. “Authors are anointed not because they are great (although many of them are) but because they are important,” he writes. “That’s why prose-toilers like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are securely fixed in the canon while masters such as Frank O’Connor and Eudora Welty could easily be left out.”

The ways in which an artist or thinker or a specific work can enter or leave a canon can be complicated and mysterious. As British critic Frank Kermode notes in an essay on the reclamation of Botticelli from the mists of history, “The oblivion into which this painter fell soon after his death was so close to being total that one might suppose it could be dissipated only by some extraordinary development in the history of taste. And that is what occurred.” Working through the account of Botticelli’s reemergence as an eminent painter, Kermode highlights the distinction between “opinion” (I like this!) and “knowledge” (here are the historical antecedents, the artistic flourishes, and all the ways this differs from that), arguing that entry into the canon obliterates the distinction between the two. Botticelli largely disappeared, was rescued from anonymity by fans, and entered the canon only after academics created a body of knowledge showing why he deserved to be there and the ways in which he was distinct from his peers.

Kermode argues that what makes an artist worthy of inclusion in the canon is how contemporary he manages to feel through the ages, how we can adapt the masters and their work to our current critical conversation. Musing on why Ulysses endures while other works from the same period, like Riceyman Steps, recede into the distance, Kermode suggests it has to do with Joyce’s novel not only having a “high value” but also standing up to “an almost rabbinical minuteness of comment and speculation,” granting it “perpetual modernity, guaranteed by continuous and fertile interpretation.”

While I imagine that some of these critics would be surprised to find their arguments about the canon applied to televisual works, their ideas align nicely with Sepinwall and Seitz’s thinking on the subject of what qualifies a work for canonical status. “Milton, like Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare before him, and like Wordsworth after him, simply overwhelmed the tradition and subsumed it. That is the strongest test for canonicity,” Bloom wrote. “The deepest truth about secular canon-formation is that it is performed by neither critics nor academies, let alone politicians. Writers, artists, composers themselves determine canons, by bridging between strong precursors and strong successors.”

TV: The Book is at least in part an exercise in discovering and traversing those bridges, mapping out the sitcoms and dramas that diverged from what came before and paved new ground to go forward upon. Consider Seitz’s write-up of Louie, standup comedian Louis C. K.’s groundbreaking sitcom on FX, judged by the pair to be the 18th-greatest television show of all time:

Seitz and Sepinwall are keenly aware of how business and technological considerations have affected the aesthetic dimensions of television, as we see in their write-up of I Love Lucy, their 8th-greatest show. Not only did Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz perfect the three-camera sitcom—a method of filming that captures the stage from three different angles (often in front of a live studio audience), from which editors could piece together the funniest takes; it is what you envision when you think “network sitcom,” from The Big Bang Theory to Seinfeld to Cheers to All in the Family and on and on backwards through time—they also filmed in 35mm. “High-quality celluloid didn’t just produce a more attractive picture than anything coming through TV sets in 1951, it produced an image that would remain viable even as TVs got better over the course of many decades, while kinescopes of shows like The Honeymooners, The Ernie Kovacs Show, and Playhouse 90 started to look as if they’d been filmed through a fish tank,” Seitz and Sepinwall explain. Compared to kinescopes—recordings of a program captured by pointing a camera at a TV that was broadcasting the show live—I Love Lucy’s high-quality, long-lasting archive paid double dividends since Desilu Productions held onto the rights of each episode, a move that would earn the company a fortune in syndication dollars.

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While reading Sepinwall and Seitz’s book, I can’t help but wonder how many of the beloved programs they discuss will be drowned in the flood of subsequent programming. The sheer volume of new shows—the thousands of hours of new stuff—and the new distribution models make it difficult for older shows to stay in circulation and for excellent new shows to impress themselves upon the national consciousness. Why would I watch an episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Netflix’s hilarious sitcom, more than once when I have 10 hours of The Handmaid’s Tale to catch up on? Aren’t I just wasting my time if I flip on TBS and zonk out to 25-year-old Seinfeld episodes? What would possibly be the point of watching a random episode of ER or Hill Street Blues or Miami Vice?

At the risk of blaspheming, one of the shows I worry about most is The Simpsons. Like any good xennial, I love the first 10 seasons of the show. (Well, the third through the ninth, anyway.) I can toss off quotations from Homer and Marge and Lisa and Bart with the best of them; I have hailed our new insect overlords more times than I can remember; I have often said “Boo-urns” and started No Homers Clubs and complained to Unkie Moe about the soda being too cold (it makes my teef hurt). Some of you may understand the gibberish above; if you do, it’s probably because you’ve seen these episodes repeatedly in syndication. For several decades, the syndication model provided repetition that helped create a common cultural currency. That model has now weakened—syndication has become less appealing to audiences—as the marketplace has been flooded with new programs and as new technologies have created new viewing options. This will likely make the sitcom almost obsolete as anything other than a day-of laugh-delivery device. The Simpsons at the peak of its powers is a show rooted in its time, one that relies as heavily on pop-culture references as it does on repeated lines of clever dialogue becoming inside jokes among initiates. Strip the show from its moment—as future audiences will experience it—and take away the repetition needed to impress the cleverness of its wordplay on viewers, and what are you left with? Something that lasts? A masterpiece that rewards critical scrutiny for future generations? Or something that fades into the ether, a pleasant memory for those born between 1970 and 1990, and perhaps an artifact of interest to scholars studying the 1990s, but few others?

Another difficulty in determining a canon is the need to separate mere nostalgia from true greatness, and Seitz and Sepinwall strive to avoid letting their childhood favorites cloud their critical judgments. Despite watching “so religiously that we can identify a particular Brady Bunch or Little House on the Prairie episode in under ten seconds,” neither show makes the top 100.

Think about the shows that populate your own personal best-of list. How much of the urge to include The Simpsons or Seinfeld comes from familiarity? Would the entirety of your list simply draw from programs that were on the air when you were watching TV? Whereas an all-time-top-10 movie list compiled by a person under the age of 40 would likely contain at least a few films made before he or she was born—Citizen Kane or The Godfather/The Godfather Part II or The Wizard of Oz or Vertigo or A Clockwork Orange or On the Waterfront—how many TV shows that aired before 1978 would make the cut? Some of you might perhaps pick I Love Lucy or The Twilight Zone—but even then, these are likely shows you watched over and over again in syndication growing up. Familiarity, in this case, breeds respect.

Another major difficulty that arises when thinking about which TV shows will last and be of interest to future generations is their length. Take, for instance, The Wire. A relatively compact series at 60 episodes over five seasons, the show would take about two-and-a-half days to watch from start to finish, assuming one forgoes sleep. Of course, no one who is employed (and no one who has a family) really binges like that; at two episodes a day, you can get through the whole thing in a month. That’s still a heavy commitment; two months, frankly, seems likelier. But what else could you have done with those 60 hours? According to HowLongToReadThis.com, which measured my reading pace to be a glacial 259 words per minute, I could finish War and Peace (21 hours and 15 minutes), Don Quixote (16 hours and 16 minutes), Moby-Dick (12 hours and 36 minutes), and still have plenty of time to squeeze in Crime and Punishment (7 hours and 3 minutes). Alternatively, I could read much of Kingsley Amis’s and Graham Greene’s fiction—the stuff worth reading, anyway—in roughly the same span of time.

What about movies? With 60 hours, you could watch the entirety of Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre—and then watch it again to pick up on all the nuances you missed the first time around. You could watch the first 27 entries on the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest American films of all time (more, if you skipped some of the lengthier, plodding works like Gone with the Wind). You could watch the last quarter-century or so of films to win Best Picture at the Oscars. You could take a tour through world cinema, watching the best of Akira Kurosawa and François Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson and Michelangelo Antonioni.

You could undertake any of those horizon-expanding artistic adventures—or you could watch one program that ran for a few years on HBO.

My point is not to denigrate The Wire in comparison to Dostoyevsky or Hitchcock—its fourth season is as defining a portrait of modern American poverty as any art form has managed to capture—so much as it is to bare a brutal truth of our recent glut of brilliant television: It takes a long time to consume most of the master works produced over the last 20 years. In the moment, as the series is unfolding, this length can be a boon. “Television’s great narrative advantage over film had always been time,” Sepinwall wrote in the afterword to Breaking Bad 101:

This is true enough. But it’s only true in the moment. It’s only true while the show in question is a going concern, while we are watching in real time, while we are experiencing a program as a community, while we use it as a way to kill time with the coworkers in lieu of discussing the weather, while we hop online to hash out each and every moment from the preceding hour of programming to mine details from the text and speculate on what will happen next. As soon as a television series ends, it becomes a movie that’s dozens of hours long, almost always a piece of content too lengthy to think about consuming again, since there are so many other dozens of hours of new experiences out there. (The fact that more than a dozen of the top 100 shows in TV (The Book), a comprehensive guide to the best of the best, were watched only by either Seitz or Sepinwall speaks to just this problem.) To extend the metaphor Sepinwall offers above, the moment a show ends—the second the closing credits roll on the series finale—a TV show becomes an ex. An ex you may have had a grand time with, mind you. An ex who possibly helped you grow. But an ex nonetheless, one who has consumed an enormous portion of your finite time on this plane of existence.

More importantly, for those of us who discover a show after the fact—once it is available for streaming in its entirety and after its ideas and ideologies have been picked over by the rest of the world—that relationship, the ups and downs and subtle changes, is never there at all. Unlike books or films, the best way to experience a show is in something approximating real time along with a community of other watchers.

So is there any point to determining a TV canon at all? There certainly are excellent TV shows, especially relative to other TV shows. There are TV shows that are produced with artistic genius and beauty and that shed light on timeless truths about the human condition. But given the nature of the medium, will these achievements last? So many great shows will slip into oblivion unloved and unmourned. For instance, I would love to share my appreciation of The Shield with more people. But I’m a realist. I am fully aware that asking most people to sit down and watch 88 episodes of a cop drama, albeit a very good cop drama with one of the few great endings of this era of narrative television, is pointless. There’s not enough time.

Even if we had a surfeit of seconds—even “if we were literally immortal,” as Bloom wrote—it’s worth considering whether any television from today will be watched for entertainment by future generations. Just because TV is a going concern now doesn’t mean it always will be. Without dipping too far into the realm of science-fiction, one doesn’t have to be too imaginative to conjure up a future in which television, as an artistic medium, withers and fades, replaced by YouTube vloggers and competitive gamers and eventually by increasingly immersive virtual reality. “Most commercial music disappears when the generation that made it dies,” music historian Ted Gioia explains to Chuck Klosterman in his book But What If We’re Wrong? “After each generation dies, only a few songs and artists enjoy a lingering fame.” That low level of recognition is held by only a few folks here and there. One wonders if prestige TV is, like any popular genre, little more than a fad that will fade as its fans die off.

Reading is fundamentally a solitary endeavor; great texts have a timelessness as each generation wrestles with the messages within. Films work well both in group settings—with big, raucous audiences of strangers coming together to gasp at a horror flick or guffaw at a comedy—and also as individual works to sit with at home and study, absorb, learn from. If medium and message truly are synchronous, then maybe television is simply something that only really works in the moment. Maybe it is inherently fleeting and flighty. Maybe “streaming” is a more apt word for our current mode of consuming television than we realized: Like a creek in your backyard it’s always there but permanently impermanent, always different, with new, fresh droplets running through it. We don’t miss the water that has disappeared forever; we just like looking at what’s there now, gurgling along. Sometimes fuller, sometimes emptier, the flow is always the same yet ever changing.

Hey, you know who never changes? Larry David. Did you happen to catch the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm? Man, it was great to have ol’ Lar’ back on the small screen after so many years away. He’s as cranky as ever, doing battle with life’s foibles. He really stuck it to the Hamilton guy, didn’t he? Say, did you see . . .

Sonny Bunch is executive editor of the Washington Free Beacon.