60 Time December 6/December 13, 2021Lies, food shows, a trashy reality dating
show (or five), creative competitions,
newsy docs, teen dramas, children’s pro-
grams and true-crime fare. What might
have begun as a strategy to court cord
cutters looking to replace a whole suite
of cable channels has escalated into a
mandate to be everything to everyone.
It’s exhausting. And now that fran-
chises and other intellectual property
(IP), from Star Wars to The Witcher,
have proliferated on streaming services,
it has contributed to my creeping sense
that television is moving on from the
merely overabundant era FX head John
Landgraf dubbed “peak TV” in 2015.
We may still be deluged with viewing
options, many of exceptional quality.
But we also have too many shows that
feel interchangeable.
Now the consensus among influen-
tial people in and around the indus-
try is that we are reaching a tipping
point. Peak redundancy can sustain it-
self for only so long before streamers
start bumping up against the limits of
viewers’ free time and disposable in-
come. The measures they’re taking to
survive the inevitable contraction of
the streaming landscape—from the race
to acquire or create valuable IP to the
competition to win over international
audiences—have their promises and
potential pitfalls. But for viewers aller-
gic to both the thought of 12 monthly
subscription fees and the schlock some
of that money is subsidizing, a pic-
ture of the future is coming into view.
And the upshot may be a TV land-
scape more navigable —for better and
worse—than the sagging status quo.
It would be hard to overstate the
sea change that has taken place in TV
since the mid-aughts, for both creators
and consumers. “It’s not like anybody
ever thought Breaking Bad would be-
come Breaking Bad,” says Mark John-
son, who won an Oscar for Rain Man
two decades before working as an ex-
ecutive producer of the era-defining
crime drama that yielded AMC’s excel-
lent prequel Better Call Saul and a grip-
ping Netflix film, El Camino. In many
ways, the trajectory of Breaking Bad—
an early beneficiary of the so-called Net-
flix bump, or spike in audience once a
show hits the streamer—has mirrored
explains, “You now have large compa-
nies in the market offering very differ-
ent ways to consume their video con-
tent.” Studios like Warner Bros. and
Disney entered the arena with decades’
worth of valuable IP in their vaults, from
Game of Thrones to Star Wars. Compet-
itors that didn’t have the archives, like
Apple and Amazon, were among the
richest corporations on earth. Netflix—
still the only major player whose reve-
nue comes almost entirely from stream-
ing subscriptions—had to quickly build
a library to survive, let alone maintain
supremacy. Miquel Penella, president of
streaming services at AMC Networks,
says this competition was originally
“driven by convenience,” but now that
virtually every major studio has its own
streaming service, convenience is “not a
point of differentiation anymore.”to make It in 2021 and beyond,
streaming services must distinguish
themselves in different ways. Most
important is, of course, the desirabil-
ity of their content. This is where the
everything- to-everyone strategy seems
to fly in the face of what economists call
product differentiation. If Netflix has
an edge on reaching every kind of cus-
tomer in the world, why not do some-
thing different? Who wants to be the
fifth-best Netflix?CULTURE
that of the TV industry at large.
That story begins sometime be-
tween the launch of YouTube in 2005,
and 2007, when Netflix began offering
licensed streaming titles. In 2013, Net-
flix launched its first high-profile orig-
inal series, an adaptation of the BBC
political drama House of Cards, with
a two-season commitment signaling
that streaming could be a serious mar-
ket for creators. As Netflix’s CCO and,
since last year, co-CEO Ted Sarandos
famously said at the time, “The goal is
to become HBO faster than HBO can
become us.”
So, as HBO and other networks
scrambled to develop robust streaming
platforms, Netflix and its competitors
Amazon Prime Video and Hulu built up
slates of prestige programming. “You
only need one signature show to be-
come a player in the streaming space,”
says Ava Greenfield, a TV literary agent
at ICM Partners. Amazon broke out in
2014 with Transparent, while Hulu lev-
eled up with The Handmaid’s Tale in- As the competition intensified,
with streamers vying for dominance
globally, Netflix spent billions ramp-
ing up its originals across genres and
languages. Many—myself included—
found this frenzy inexplicable.
It all made sense by 2019. As stream-
ing industry analyst Dan Rayburn