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Granted, studios trying to eat one
another’s lunches isn’t new. As Katy
McCaff rey, a co-head of the TV literary
department at the talent agency Gersh,
puts it, “ ‘Where’s my this right now?’”
has long been a common refrain among
TV executives. In the 1990s, this was
Friends. A generation later, Mad Men.
Part of the diff erence, now, comes down
to scale. The number of scripted TV
shows alone has ballooned from several
dozen before cable to around 500 since
the late 2010s, with recent growth pri-
marily driven by streaming. More ser-
vices means more content, and more
content means more overlap.
To be fair, some streamers have suc-
cessfully diff erentiated their products.
Now that Netfl ix has become not just
HBO but essentially a full cable package
unto itself, Apple TV+ has embraced
the original HBO model: releasing a rel-
atively small, highly curated selection
of series with big names and high pro-
duction values. Disney+ is streaming’s
family- entertainment monolith. But formany streamers, going niche isn’t on the
table. Tanya Giles, ViacomCBS Stream-
ing’s chief programming offi cer, tells me
via email, “We believe in order to be a
global leader in streaming, you must be
a total household product .”
With so many streamers pursuing
this generalist strategy, viewers who
subscribe to multiple services are un-
derwriting a lot of redundant program-
ming. Yet for all the real estate and
superhero fl uff , streaming TV in 2021
is no wasteland. Netfl ix made history in
September as the fi rst streamer to be-△
Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers,
left, and HBO’s The White
Lotus, right: twin star-studded
summer dramas about rich
people on vacationcome the biggest winner at the Emmys
with the prestige dramas The Crown and
The Queen’s Gambit. Apple’s Ted Lasso
and HBO Max’s Hacks split the comedy
categories with SNL.
Many of these shows hit a rare sweet
spot: they’re both critically acclaimed
and attract relatively large audiences.
But they don’t alleviate the fear many
have that original content is declining in
quality, especially as Netfl ix cancels ex-
citing or groundbreaking shows like The
OA or Glow while producing the gim-
micky dating contest Sexy Beasts, or a
sitcom like The Kominsky Method that
might fi t in on a broadcast network. In
January, Black-ish creator Kenya Barris
exited a lucrative Netfl ix deal because,
he later explained, “Netfl ix became
CBS.” (Confusingly, Barris is now at
ViacomCBS.) But Netfl ix’s global head
of TV, Bela Bajaria, says, “I think it’s an
old-fashioned way of looking at it: ‘Are
you premium or broadcast? Are you
CBS? Are you HBO?’”
She also argues that a wide range of
programming generates greater inclu-
sion , which is why much of this year’s
best TV feels like it couldn’t have been
made at any other time. The Under-
ground Railroad, Barry Jenkins’ epic
Amazon adaptation of the Colson
Whitehead novel, is one of the 21st cen-
tury’s greatest works of art to date. Even
a decade ago, who would’ve footed the
bill for it, which sometimes reportedly
approached $1.5 million per day? Would
the HBO of The Sopranos era have aired
Raoul Peck’s unapologetically intellec-
tual docuseries on white supremacy,
Exterminate All the Brutes?
“When you’re looking at disenfran-
chised voices, we need to make spe-
cial eff orts to lift up those stories,” says
Gloria Calderón Kellett, the creator
of a critically acclaimed One Day at a
Time reboot that centered on a Cuban-
American family and began at Netf-
lix before moving to ViacomCBS cable
channel Pop TV. Calderón Kellett cor-
rectly notes that reliance on audience
data has been known to exacerbate
racial bias.
Yet in many recent cases, titles on
the bubble have become viable, thanks
to such detailed data—the existence
of which has driven the misguided
impression that human beings withL E T T H E M WAT C H C A K E
Fall has become baking-competition
season, with just about every
streamer rolling out its own
variation on a recipe popularized
NINE PERFECT STRANGERS: HULU; THE WHITE LOTUS: HBO by the Food Network