American TV has become the equivalent of India’s Bollywood—an almost unimaginably prolific source of filmed entertainment. Bollywood produces more than a thousand movies a year, more than double Hollywood’s output. Similarly, the networks and cable channels and streaming services have been flooding, nay, tsunami-ing us with series. Netflix, the most active of the streamers, has committed a staggering $6 billion this year to produce original material. It is estimated that Amazon will spend over $3 billion.
They are tossing off shows the way Georges Simenon and Isaac Asimov wrote novels. They secure cultural cachet with flashy stuff that commands watercooler conversation (Netflix’s House of Cards, Amazon’s Transparent) while they make bank on the comic-book science-fiction stuff (Stranger Things and Jessica Jones and Luke Cage on Netflix, The Man in the High Castle on Amazon) that draws young men in basements like moths to flames.
