A number of old TV shows have gotten reboots: Frasier, Night Court, and Sex and the City. Many viewers are also tuning into original seasons of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Suits. A lot of nostalgic rewatching is happening, says Washington Post TV Critic Lili Loofbourow.
“There is a rhythm to the traditional broadcast television sitcom. … The sitcom always comfortably resets at the end. It's not challenging television, it's not what we associate with prestige or peak TV. … There's a restfulness to it that I think is very appealing.”
She notes that prestige and peak TV are different: “Prestige TV had its origin still on broadcast television, right? You think of The Sopranos and Mad Men … Breaking Bad. It was ambitious television that … was tempting you to side with the antihero. … Peak TV, by contrast, is an artifact of streaming, as the streamers were … buying up a lot of content … and greenlighting a lot of shows that were interesting, niche, weird, would probably not have found a home on broadcast TV.”
She notes that the industry went from an abundance of cheap programming to “a kind of panic,” particularly last year when Netflix announced that it lost more subscribers than it signed on new ones. Steamers then thought there were no more subscribers to be had. They canceled orders for new shows, nixed deals, cut costs, and added advertisements.
“Streamers, in general, I think are poised to get quite a bit worse. … There's going to be fewer offerings, it's going to be more expensive, there are going to be ads, a lot of these services are merging.”
Loofbourow continues, “I'm thinking of post-TV as the surviving slice of interesting, vanguard-y stuff that will still be happening, even as I think a lot of programming is probably going to get less ambitious and less experimental.”
Meanwhile, the Hollywood strikes are tackling what TV will be like in the future.
“We have gone from a moment where so many creative folks were getting deals … to create television with comparative freedom — to one where if studios were to succeed in resorting to AI for writing and digital representations for acting, it would be an industry with neither actors nor writers.”