Something I don’t really know how to come to terms with: I earned a college degree in Television. The whole affair felt like a hack, but quickly after graduating I realized that the reason it felt like I was getting away with something is that I had gotten away without anything. This isn’t to say my college years were wasted. They pretty much were, except in the sense that no time is wasted, time is time and existence equals experience + we are the aggregate of the moments we spend existing, yada yada. But as certain degrees have been reduced to check-marks on a resume, to pass/fails in order to prove to employers that you are, in fact, well-indoctrinated, the raw value of things learned is much lower than time spent being talked at.
This is well-trod territory. The fact remains that I spent three years studying television and know a bit about [how it works], and that supplementary studies in the humanities give me some authority as to [why it does]. The simplest paradigm I can suggest is that we live in the Cliff Hanger Era: individual episodes can be generally meaningless, so long as towards the end the narrative arch ramps boldly upwards and we are compelled, in the final moments, to continue watching. This is why the sitcoms you watch— shows which re-set by the end of every episode— are all re-runs from the 90’s through 2010 (Seinfeld, Friends, The Office). Those shows rely on familiarity and your nostalgic brain feeling like it is visiting an old friend group, talking about the same things you’ve talked about hundreds of times before. Meanwhile, the new shows which are considered Prestige are often short-lived (three to four seasons), and the characters in the final seasons are unrecognizable to who they were in Episode One.
The problem which arises from the constant elevation of stakes, from increasing the temperature exactly one degree per episode, is that things can only get so hot before melting. By the end of Season One the premise may be vaguely related to the one on which the show was based (who will succeed Logan Roy? Will BoJack Horseman find relevancy in his middle ages? How does Eleanor remain in the Good Place?) and by the end of Season Four what used to be called “jumping the shark” now flies as par for the course: Will Roman or Shiv choose the next president? Did BoJack kill Sarah Lynn or assault Penny (or Gina)? Can Eleanor convince God to re-write the rules of Heaven? Twenty years ago these plots would have seemed like ludicrous departures from the show that folks originally agreed to watch. Now they are prerequisites for renewal. How did we get here, and how do these new shows work?
A Bored and Diluted Landscape
This new paradigm is the result of 1) a growing distaste of predictability, 2) prestigious play- and screen-writers accepting Streamer checks, and 3) folks preferring to invest a few years into a series of gripping ten-hour movies, but needing those movies to amp it up every time to avoid #1.
There are also many more shows divided across the same amount of viewers. In ’86, ’87, and ’88 at least twenty-five million people regularly watched the soap opera EastEnders. One of the top programs of 2023 has been Succession, which was viewed by 1.4 million people in its final season[1]. Also changed is the modern sensibility. Sure, in a George Bush world things can slowly evolve, characters can fall in and out of love for six years and friends can live in the same apartment for time-indefinite no matter their employment status. But we don’t live in that world. We live in the world of shifting interest rates, of ten-second videos flying by in rapid succession making us laugh, making us feel, teaching us, aggravating us, introducing new characters and premises which are immediately irrelevant to history; we live in the world of presidents being impeached every fifteen months and of new coups and international conflicts erupting once per season. We live in a world where TV is no longer a uniting force because rather than having four shows which each speak to twenty million people we have twenty million shows which each speak to four.
Enter the modern landscape. With a massive growth of people with the job description “Television Writer” comes a lot of intelligent, creative people working within the increasingly insipid demands of execs and advertisers responding to a smaller and smaller cabal of tech and Studio-Head billionaires. The writers’ answer to these concerns— this new paradigm within television— is something which resembles the contemporary mindset. That is: something nihilistic, something low-key hardcore, something poignant and moralistic without entering challenging, something gritty without entering gruesome, and something which evolves fast. Like the rules of Meme-culture, as soon as an iteration is caught on to it must evolve, and as soon as the evolution is understood by a critical mass it must once again change until it is unrecognizable to the original and can re-surface six months later as a totem of nostalgia. In order to continue speaking to younger and more dismissive audiences, in order to retain attention when attention is capital and the competition is an infinite bounty of content, they have jacked up the stakes and obfuscated reality where it didn’t allow room for more and more ludicrous developments.
The artistry enters, far behind the proverbial eight-ball, not with how to make some sort of commentary within this new model, but what to comment on. Faced with such insidious terms, and being as insular and self-involved as the TV Writing community tends to be, a commentary on the paradigm becomes the paradigm. This is worth repeating. A commentary on the paradigm becomes the paradigm. This is the best way I can describe “progressive entertainment.” From a generation raised in a post-structural world, where meta is no longer meta if it exists on the same physical plane as the reality it is meta’ing from, entertainment must signal that it is intellectually and morally more advanced than you for it to be engaging. (For those who are left behind, the exact opposite must be true: it must be so far beneath you so that when you look down you can easily comprehend the way in which you are above it. This is how we get, on the other end of the spectrum, Emily in Paris and Bridgerton. The people who enjoy these shows know full well that they are not technically or thematically or culturally boundary-pushing, and appreciate them for this reason.)
The Other Two
Okay, The Other Two. This show originally aired on Comedy Central and moved to HBOMax, and you’ve never heard of it because it was only watched by .2 million people[2] (these days, just enough to be renewed for three seasons).
The basic structure of TOT and other shows of the ilk is this: 1) a classic premise is introduced[3], 2) the show quickly explodes into lunacy and then 3) lunacy becomes surrealism, and reality is discarded. In The Other Two the premise is that two flailing millennials must contend with the overnight fame of their Gen-Z brother (a Justin Bieber knock-off). Season One comfortably tackles this dilemma in a familiar way. The two struggling siblings learn to use their little brother’s fame to their own advantage. The plot escalates until both older characters get to the brink of what they want, but at the moment of claiming the fame and success they feel they deserve they realize they’ve been selfish, and that they’ve failed to consider what their little brother wants. When he decides to quit show business and go to college, their success tap is turned off and they must do the right thing, accept defeat, and let their family return to normalcy. The twist comes in the final moments: in the frenzy caused by the youngest brothers fame, the mother (played by Molly Shannon) becomes an overnight daytime talk-show sensation (think: Oprah).
Season Two opens with this new premise, but it is on HBO now, and things must evolve even faster. Struggling actor-brother Cary becomes nationally famous after a photo of his butthole is leaked. Sister-turned-manager Brooke is chosen for Variety’s 30 Under 30 and her simple-minded ex-boyfriend becomes an overnight fashion mogul. We have left the plane of reality, and by the middle of Season Two have gaggles of virgin gay-fluencers, little brother becomes a part-owner of the Nets, and talk-show host mom is a music/game-show tycoon instantly recognizeable to everyone. The show has become a farce, and while the central struggle of the main characters is unchanged, they have become cartoonish replications of their original identities. The problem: Season Three must somehow escalate even further.
Without going into gory detail, we suddenly have characters winning Peabody awards, Mom is so famous she must alert the Mayor a week in advance in order to walk through Central Park, Marvel actors and billionaires pine after the main cast and one character goes to space twice in a week. Logic dissipates as some people are chronically black-and-white, some characters turn into vampires and charity empires are built and collapsed in mere hours. This is all emblematic of the state of prestige TV. Remember when Dory from Search Party becomes a cult-leader who instigates a zombie-apocalypse? What the hell is even happening on Big Mouth? Westworld? Shows must make grand gestures to be the end-all be-all commentary on Social Media, on fame-obsessed youth, on the absolute hysteria involving celebrity-culture, on the transmogrification of politics into Reality TV, on the transmogrification of Reality TV into Surreality TV. Even documentary mini-series must escalate to this manic apex: Tiger King, How To With John Wilson, and Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal must go to great lengths to make reality appear like the hyperrealist madness that it resembles on X or TikTok or, in a strange twist, in The New York Times and the what-the-hell-have-we-done Associated Press.
We’re left to ask: is reality as wild as it appears? Was it, perhaps, briefly sane and now returned to its natural state of maddeningly entropic? Are we numb, and reality must be relayed to us at louder and louder pitches for us to hear?
The stinger: these programs, the Bojack’s and the Search Party’s and the Other Two’s all end in a similar fashion. One which, if they truly do resemble the mold of the contemporary mindset, leave me with a twinge of hope. At their final moments they attest something simple and beautiful: namely, that simplicity is beautiful. That fulfillment is available and easy, and does not involve a phone or a Red Carpet. That Cary can turn down the Oscar-bait role-of-a-lifetime to stroll a beach and connect with old friends. That family, nature, present-living, kindness to strangers and loyalty-to-friends is what matters, and the rest is pure noise. In the last notes of these sickening symphonies the young writers of these prestigious and minimally viewed pieces of entertainment step back, apologize for what they’ve done, and tell you it’ll all be alright if you just go for a walk, take a deep breath. Believe, against all odds, in things like Honesty, Duty, Kindness, and Presence.
[1] The biggest shows of the last few years (Stranger Things, Bridgerton) streamed on Netflix, who famously obscures viewership numbers and counts “Minutes Watched,” most likely in order to avoid the embarrassment of releasing numbers which look like mice next to the wooly mammoth that is M*A*S*H Nielsen Ratings. The WGA is striking, in part, to change this.
[2] Perhaps you’ve seen its thematic parallel, Search Party, which averaged a much more impressive .4 million viewers.
[3] “Classic Premises” changed with the Sopranos and Breaking Bad into the following definition: something familiar has a surprising twist element.