TV kinda sucks now

Kill Your Television, Burning Man ’97

This Slate piece put into words what I’ve been trying to:

The reason TV characters felt real was because we spent real time with them—a standing date, week in and week out. They were in our homes more often than anyone but our immediate family, and they, usually, aged as we did, whether or not the show acknowledged it. Buffy started sophomore year one season and junior year the next; John Carter went from raw med student to seasoned chief resident. We knew on some level that the barflies from Cheers weren’t really our drinking buddies, but they served the same function—a group of lively, funny, unpredictable oddballs you always knew where to find. They were, in the words of another classic sitcom, there for you.

Streaming shows, by contrast, turn up when they feel like it—dropping by months or years later, sometimes without even the courtesy of an advance announcement. Rather than a steady, manageable commitment, they take up hours at a clip, like an old college buddy who’s in town only for the night. The sustained engagement can be exhilarating, but then it’s over, and who knows when they’ll be back.

Netflix’s binge-drop model disrupted the stodgy rhythms of old-school TV. No longer would you have to wait a week to get more of what you wanted. It was all there to be consumed at your own pace. Network TV, operating on an industrial model that produced 22 episodes on a more or less annual schedule, had been on the wane for years, but now it didn’t just feel cheaper than the competition; it was slower. So we left our old pals, reliable but a little boring, for the new kids in town, and for a time that worked out great. The streaming shows were prettier and more exciting, and the gold rush meant throwing money at ideas—like, say, a cartoon about a self-loathing ex–TV star who is also a horse—that the old model would never have come close to embracing. But as the bubble began to burst, the shows got less adventurous, less diverse, less distinctive. (Can you imagine Amazon greenlighting a show about a Jewish family’s trans matriarch now?) And once that happened, the trade no longer felt like such a fair one. 

 Back in the day, Vincent Chase’s less talented brother, Johnny “Drama,” starred in that universe’s Viking Quest which, despite being off the air since its first and only season in the 1990s, nevertheless ran for a “full 22.”

Take Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was a large ensemble cast, but with 26 episodes in the first season (even if one of them was Code of Honor, sigh), that’s almost 20 hours we spent with that crew. Over 7 seasons, that episode count racks up. Deep Space 9, ditto. Voyager, ditto (though I started losing interest around then). Even maligned Enterprise, cut short at 4 seasons, had more than 20 episodes per season. And those shows came out like clockwork. We knew when they’d be on, when they returned to the schedule, etc.

I tried to get into Star Trek: Discovery. Or even Strange New Worlds. I really did. But with low episode counts, overloaded casts (which work when you have a long season to get to know them in, but not so much when you spend, like, a weekend with them on a binge, or a month or two watching more spread out), they don’t stick. They’re interesting people you met on vacation, not guests you regularly welcomed into your home. (Never mind that Michael Burnham is no Jean-Luc Picard, or Benjamin Sisko.)

Firefly worked because it was quick and witty and interesting and had basically Mal, Zoe, Wash, Kaylee, Inara, Simon, River, and Shepherd Book. You had more characters than that just on the bridge of the Discovery. I came away remembering Michael Burnham, Saru, Tilly, and Pike, but hold a gun to my head I couldn’t pick out (pulling from a Google hit) Detmer, Owosekun, Rhys, Bryce, Airiam, Nilsson, or Linus.

Not like I could Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, Scotty (which, why was he always on the bridge?), Rand. Or Yar, Worf, Data, Wesley Crusher, Riker, Picard, Troi. La Forge (started off as a bridge officer before moving to helm Engineering). Crusher and even her one-season replacement, Pulaski. Ensign Ro. Chief O’Brien (although he had a larger role in DS9, so that helped him be memorable).

You either need a much smaller cast with a lot of time spent with them (and not as much on whiz-bang special effects and plot MacGuffins), or a lot of time to spend with the ensemble. Modern TV, at least in the genres I’m usually drawn to, give us neither.

The one exception I can think of, early seasons of Game of Thrones. Maybe because they had the books to keep things coherent (finish them, dammit, George! Write Like the Wind came out 12 years ago!). But even with a huge cast sprawling over more than a continent, it was easy to keep things straight and to get invested in the characters' stories - and remember their names. Even though every season generally had 10 episodes, that followed a somewhat predictable rhythm (epoch shifting penultimate episode – Baelor (the genre will never be the same after what happened to Ned); Blackwater; the Red Wedding in S3 E9 The Rains of Castamere – and then a more somber episode as the world adjusted. Then the waiting. But I digress.

I get it. We’re in the age of Prestige TV, where shows have generally higher quality, but much shorter, seasons. But I think we’ve lost something.