When streaming first arrived, I bought into the dream completely. I mean, as a TV Fanatic (there’s a reason I own the joint), why wouldn’t I want an endless supply of TV I love within my grasp?
I never bought into the idea of the replacement of broadcast television or even the death of cable, although I cut my cable company out of the loop about five years ago (Sorry, Verizon Fios). I didn’t buy into any of that nonsense people always seem to jump to when talking about the entertainment industry.
The dream was more: more stories, more opportunities, and more room for television to become everything it could be instead of constantly fighting for space on a schedule designed decades earlier.
I never thought broadcast television was going away, nor did I want it to. Broadcast serves a purpose. It gives us procedurals and sitcoms and reality shows and game shows and all the comfort-food television that people genuinely enjoy. And it’s free!
That’s not an insult. Some of my favorite shows have been broadcast shows. The point wasn’t that streaming would replace any of that. The point was that it would supplement it.
Broadcast could continue doing what it does well, while streaming became a place where different kinds of stories could flourish. The niche stuff. The weird stuff. The heavily serialized stuff. The expensive stuff.
The stories that might not attract twenty million viewers every week but would inspire fierce loyalty from the people who found them seemed ideal for streaming, just like it once was for cable.
For a while, it actually looked like that might happen, which is probably why I’m still so annoyed. This isn’t one of those situations where somebody sold me a fantasy that never existed.
For a few years, it genuinely felt like television was expanding. Every week, there seemed to be another ambitious project in development, another creator signing a deal, another service trying to distinguish itself with something different. It felt like there was finally room for everything.
Then somewhere along the way, it stopped.
And today, that change feels abrupt. Face it; streaming won. It didn’t fail. It didn’t collapse. Most of us have multiple subscriptions whether we want them or not.
The industry didn’t disappear, either. But somehow, despite all the money and all the technology and all the services and all the promises, the experience of being a television fan feels smaller than I thought it would.
The first place I noticed it was with scripted content itself. Oh, there’s still plenty of content. Every service on earth wants to tell me how much content it has. Content has become one of those corporate words that sounds impressive until you stop and think about what it actually means.
I don’t want content. I want television. You know what I mean. I want the stories; the characters! I want to fall in love with and despise characters. I want them to be brilliant and stupid. I want to laugh, cry and understand the lives of fictional characters over a long period.
I want creators taking risks, trying things, and occasionally falling on their faces because that’s what happens when people are allowed to experiment.
Instead, it feels like we’re slowly drifting back toward the same types of programming that already existed before streaming arrived. The promise of streaming wasn’t more procedurals, more broad comedies, more reality programming, or more attempts to appeal to the widest possible audience.
It wasn’t. And if you say it was, I won’t believe you. I refuse.
I mean, it would be fine if those things existed alongside a thriving ecosystem of risk-taking scripted television, but increasingly, it feels like they’re replacing it. With the exception of Apple TV. God bless Apple TV. Really.
And then there are the episode counts, which honestly wouldn’t bother me nearly as much if everything else had worked out the way we were told it would.
I’ve never been one of those people who believe every show needs twenty-two episodes. Some stories are better at eight. Some are better at ten. Some could probably tell the exact same story in six episodes instead of twelve.
But there was supposed to be a tradeoff. The tradeoff was abundance. Maybe a season is shorter, but there are more shows. Maybe a season is shorter, but the next one arrives faster. Maybe a season is shorter because creators have more opportunities to tell more stories.
Instead, we somehow ended up with six or eight episodes followed by a two-year wait, and I’m sorry, but that’s absurd.
By the time some shows return, I’ve forgotten half the supporting characters and most of the plot details, and then the service helpfully recommends a bunch of YouTube recaps because apparently even they know nobody remembers what happened. That’s not a viewing experience. It’s homework.
And honestly, I might be willing to live with all of that if streaming had delivered on the other half of the promise because the new shows were only part of what excited me in the first place.
The other part was the library. Maybe that’s the Gen Xer in me, but I was genuinely excited by the idea that decades of television history would finally become accessible. And not just the biggest hits or the shows that already air somewhere every afternoon.
I thought all those forgotten dramas and family series and legal shows and cult favorites that disappeared after their original runs would finally have a home. Well, excuse me for having a damned dream.
Because instead, I’m still asking the same questions I was asking ten years ago.
Where is Judging Amy? Seriously, where is it?
It ran for six seasons. People watched it. They liked it. A lot! It wasn’t some obscure experiment that aired at 2 am on a local station in rural Nebraska. It was a successful network drama, and yet if I decide tomorrow that I want to revisit it, I’m basically out of luck.
And then there’s China Beach, which somehow remains trapped in a never-ending rights nightmare despite being exactly the kind of show streaming should have rescued years ago.
China Beach was on Howdy (thank GOD), but without the original music. Uh, a show that touched so many lives deserves to have the original music rights attached to it!
Like, WTF, people? Did someone figure, “Eh, screw it. It’s not like that series touched the hearts of several generations or anything. Give it the lame music touch.” Again. What the actual EF???
That’s the part that really blows my mind. We’re sitting on roughly eighty years of television history. Eighty years. Think about that for a second. Thousands and thousands of shows have been produced during that time.
There are entire generations of television that younger viewers have never had the opportunity to discover, and yet streaming services seem far more interested in promoting whatever they released last Thursday than preserving the medium they’re supposedly built around.
And even when content does exist somewhere, good luck finding it.
That’s another promise that somehow got reversed. Finding things was supposed to become easier. Instead, I spend half my time fighting interfaces that seem designed to push me toward whatever the service wants me to watch instead of helping me find what I actually want.
Why can’t I browse 1980s dramas? Why can’t I search for 1990s family series? Why can’t I click on a category labeled “Forgotten Network Shows” and spend an afternoon discovering things I’ve either forgotten or never knew existed?
The technology clearly exists. These services know everything about me. They know what I’ve watched, when I’ve watched it, what I finished, what I abandoned, and probably how many times I’ve rewatched an episode of something while folding laundry.
They can somehow determine that because I watched one mystery series three years ago, I might enjoy a Norwegian thriller featuring a detective with emotional baggage and a drinking problem (don’t judge me). But helping me find a drama from 1987? Apparently, that’s impossible.
And while we’re talking about things nobody asked for, what in the hell happened to television apps?
I open a television service looking for television and somehow I have to navigate around sports and podcasts and games and live events and whatever else somebody in a conference room decided would increase engagement metrics.
I don’t want engagement metrics. I want television. That’s the relationship. I give you money. You give me television. Why are we making this complicated?
If people want sports, that’s great. Let them have sports. If people want podcasts, terrific. Let them have podcasts. But why does every streaming service suddenly need to become everything? Wasn’t the whole point that they could serve different audiences? Wasn’t that what made this exciting in the first place?
Instead, it feels like every service is chasing the exact same audience while simultaneously making it harder for television fans to find actual television.
And hey, I’m all for appealing to everyone with this caveat. Appeal to me first. When I log in with my user name, appeal to me! Don’t hijack me. Don’t make me wade through garbage you know I will never, ever utilize.
And if I have already seen an episode, remove the damned “new episode” banner. Yes, I’m looking at you, HBO Max. I live for my true crime. You fool me all the time with that damn banner. Enough already!
Shoutout to Prime Video for the “watch again” notification. Instead of “watch” it shows “watch again” when I have already seen it. Thank you.
And it’s embarrassing how often I fall for the same content, because all the similar content I think should be there can only be found on YouTube, from someone’s grandmother’s old VHS tape recording.
Oh, and Netflix? Screw you and your constantly changing thumbnails. Want to know why I spend less time on your platform? That’s a reason. I’m not interested in trickery. I’ll stick around and watch a hundred hours, but not if you’re tricking me or making me wade through crap I will never touch. Not sorry.
And then (Because it gets better, folks!), as if streaming wasn’t already moving away from scripted programming, broadcast television decided to wave the white flag, too. Remember summer television? Remember when networks actually tried?
Some of those shows were terrible. Some were fantastic. Some became cult classics. Some were all three at once. Zoo? Braindead? Be still, my beating heart. At the very least, there was an effort to keep scripted programming alive year-round.
Now summer often feels like a giant shrug. Reality shows. Sports. Reruns. Maybe a game show if we’re lucky.
It’s as though the entire industry collectively decided viewers don’t really want scripted television anymore, despite the fact that every genuinely great scripted series immediately becomes the thing everybody is talking about.
Which brings me to the most ridiculous part of all of this.
I’ve started reading more books. I spent years with a massive library that followed me wherever I went. Then I joined this business, and TV became my life. And that life was never dull. At least not until about 2021.
And it’s not because I fell out of love with television or that books suddenly replaced television in my life. I’ve started reading more because I’m running out of things I genuinely want to watch, and that sentence sounds completely insane when you stop and think about it.
We have roughly eighty years of television history and more than a century of film history behind us. We have more technology than ever before. More services than ever before. More subscriptions than ever before. More ways to access entertainment than any generation could have imagined.
And yet somehow I find myself sitting there thinking, “I guess I’ll read a book.”
It seems that the only thing we don’t have more of on TV now is, well, TV. That’s not supposed to happen.
Streaming didn’t let me down because it failed. It let me down because it promised abundance and delivered fragmentation. It promised access and delivered scavenger hunts. It promised a bigger television universe and somehow made that universe feel smaller.
And for someone who genuinely loves television, who built a career around television, who still gets excited when a great new show comes along, or I can rewatch a beloved show from the past, that’s a disappointment I may never get over.