TV is better than ever — yet we talk endlessly about the same tiny handful of shows

In recent weeks, the knives have come out for so-called “prestige TV,” the high-toned cable and streaming dramas that drive so much discussion on the internet and earn so much attention from the media.

Many of these arguments suggest that TV isn’t as good as the media would like you to think it is, and that its prominence in our current cultural discourse is a disquieting trend — one that ignores the fact that the medium has always been formulaic. And yet these arguments also mostly focus on a tiny handful of shows, disregarding the vast majority of exciting television currently on the air in favor of beating up on a few online favorites.

Writes Eric Thurm at Esquire:

There has to be some element that does genuinely engage audiences, but a lot of the parts of prestige TV are eminently for sale. It’s never been easier to manufacture “quality,” simply because the ingredients—high production values, decently well-known actors, a slight degree of directorial flourish—are in such high supply. With audiences shrinking and becoming more niche, it’s easier to make splashes with casting choices. ... In these cases, the product is fun and occasionally engaging, but it’s rarely challenging or great. It’s a product.

And Matt Christman at Current Affairs:

As a result, the subgenre of “Prestige TV” has become a tautological concept, with show after show earning the label simply by aping the aesthetic sensibility and glossy production value of the shows that first defined the genre. Everything is brooding, tortured anti-heroes, stillness punctuated by sudden acts of violence, montage and ironically counterposed musical choices. Plus bad writing—really, howlingly bad writing.

There is merit to these arguments (and Thurm and Christman are just the latest in a steady trickle of pieces from the past several months). TV is nothing if not an endless Xerox machine of ideas that have either garnered high ratings or won Emmys. And we’re currently living through an era when many TV dramas, even some with substantial acclaim, feel like the latest variations on forms that were introduced by The Sopranos and The Wire, then further codified by Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. So-called prestige TV, even when it’s good or great, is often just as formulaic as any given CBS crime procedural.

But dig a little deeper, and it’s easy to identify the real culprit behind the brewing backlash that Christman and Thurm (with whom, full disclosure, I worked briefly at the A.V. Club) are helping to fuel. The problem isn’t TV itself, but media-driven conversations around TV, which many people often find annoying. (Hey, I often do too.)

In particular, the complaints that Thurm and Christman suggest the media isn’t making about the shows they single out (Fargo for Thurm; Westworld for Christman) often are being made by TV critics. And both writers fail to acknowledge that there have never been more good shows on television at any given time in the medium’s history, in favor of cherry-picking specific examples.

But if you take a step back to consider television as a whole, it’s easy to identify the root of their concerns: namely, the way that click-driven online media outlets sometimes seem — almost mysteriously — to elevate certain shows to the status of “important” by writing about them a lot. Is Game of Thrones a “better” show than Sundance’s little-watched Rectify? Not at all. But one gets written about a whole lot more.

The argument that TV is better than ever and is experiencing some sort of second golden age has existed since the 1970s, and the attendant counterarguments are generally just as old. So is pointing to one specific show that exemplifies what’s wrong with the TV water cooler. The same conversation keeps circling back around.

The more specific arguments Thurm and Christman make broadly date back to the mid-’90s, when a wave of gutsy, groundbreaking programs — The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The X-Files, the influential but canceled Twin Peaks — coincided with a sense that major Hollywood studios were less willing to take chances on artistically challenging films. That led many people to conclude that TV was somehow “better” than the movies, which led to backlash, and so on.

This cycle seems to travel in five-year increments or so. (I even contributed to said cycle back in 2013, when Breaking Bad was about to end and it seemed like TV drama didn’t know how to escape the white male antihero glut.) A new show is held up by the media as the latest hot thing, it proves to not be literally perfect, and a new cycle of “Actually, TV Is Bad” settles in.

Central to any Actually, TV Is Bad argument is the simple fact that the economic factors that converged to make TV more open to artistically adventurous work than it had been before (a multitude of new networks and streaming platforms, a variety of new revenue streams, etc.) also made it possible for lots and lots of bad TV to flourish. The total number of TV shows — not just scripted, but reality and late-night and kids shows and on and on — numbers well into the thousands, and many of those are execrable.

This can make TV’s centrality to the cultural conversation seem completely nuts if you compare acclaimed the spy drama The Americans to Mountain Monsters (a reality show I keep getting emails about, in which a crew of monster hunters tracks something called the “Sheepsquatch,” among other creatures). But the flip side is also easy to argue — the vast ocean of cheap, crappy programming creates an economic structure that better allows networks to fund more artistically adventurous programming that will only make money in the long term, after years of playing on streaming platforms.

None of this is to say that TV is or isn’t better than the movies, or that certain TV shows aren’t overpraised, or that the conversation around television can’t become overbearing. There are shows I genuinely like, really and truly, that I often feel are overhyped, and there are under-the-radar shows I wish would get even a hundredth of the attention of a show like Game of Thrones, which continues to surprise me with the sheer level of devotion it inspires.

That those under-the-radar shows aren’t likely to break out, however, isn’t really a failure of television, which has more good shows at this point in time than it ever has at any point in its history. The blame for that belongs to those who talk about TV.

Christman’s argument that Westworld was received with unquestioning fawning, simply because it was on HBO, seems a little silly if you engage with the generally mixed reviews of the program. It seems much less silly if you engage with the entirety of Westworld content on this great internet of ours, much of which is dedicated to puzzling out what the show’s true message is, or how its many timelines fit together, or any number of other things.

There has been plenty of critical engagement with the show’s themes, characterization, and larger messages, but it’s been largely drowned out by theorizing and endless speculation surrounding the particulars of the plot and setting. In and of itself, this is fine. The same was largely true of Lost when it was on the air, and The Sopranos inspired its share of “who’s going to die next” fan fervor, but both shows have largely gone on to healthy afterlives, where they are discussed more for their larger qualities now that all their cards are out on the table.

The problem that Westworld faces that Lost and The Sopranos didn’t have to deal with is that there are so many more media outlets now — including Vox, which is not immune to Westworld theorizing! — and roughly the same number of shows that attain what my friend (and Slate TV critic) Willa Paskin calls “escape velocity” and cross over into the culture as a whole.

The shows that have that quality of escape velocity tend to be shows that allow some degree of fan theorizing (whether it takes the Westworld form of dwelling on plots and timelines or the form of attempting to catalogue every ’80s reference in Stranger Things). These shows are often, though not always, genre dramas. And they’re almost always on HBO, Netflix, FX, or AMC — the big four networks of online TV discussion.

(There are exceptions for individual projects. USA’s Mr. Robot and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale have certainly inspired some degree of media fervor, though I don’t know that either has attained escape velocity just yet. But airing on one of the Big Four is a major leg up.)

By and large, online TV discussion is a product of the early 2000s, when the episodic recap sprang up at sites like Television Without Pity and was later used by critics like Alan Sepinwall to dissect a show piece by piece. (Disclosure: Both Sepinwall and TWOP co-founder Tara Ariano are friends of mine.) Some shows could withstand this exacting level of analysis; most could not. But the recap format dovetailed perfectly with the internet’s constant need for new stuff to look at, and it stuck.

The problem was that recaps didn’t stick for every show equally. They were uniquely suited to serialized dramas, and if those dramas contained any pulpier elements, all the better. (Mad Men is the notable non-pulpy exception here.) But the format didn’t work as well for comedies, or crime procedurals, or animated kids shows.

Meanwhile, the audience for TV recaps largely self-selected to be the kinds of people who wanted to read this sort of thing. And those people already had a very limited number of channels, starting with HBO primarily, that they considered worthy of serious attention. (That list has expanded — AMC and Netflix were later additions — but only rarely.)

As the number of sites competing for that finite number of eyeballs has grown larger and larger, the focus has drilled down ever more on the handful of shows that TV critics and the outlets they write for (including myself and Vox) know will capture your attention. Game of Thrones in essentially any form will garner a predictably large amount of traffic, while it’s much harder to get readers to look at articles about, say, The Americans, try though we might.

But the economy of talking about television on the internet is also a fan-driven one, which gives an edge to writers who like the shows they write about, usually, and to pieces that boost the shows they talk about. At a former job, an editor told me that people didn’t want to read pieces that were critical of Breaking Bad during a week we had set aside for pieces about the show. And he was right — the critical piece we ended up running did well, but not nearly as well as more booster-oriented pieces.

This often creates the weird perception that absolutely everybody cares about shows like Westworld or Fargo, when those shows’ ratings — though good — aren’t nearly in the same league as the ratings of even the lower-rated shows on the four major broadcast networks. The reason is simple: People who care about these shows really care about them and will read most everything written about them. It’s a seemingly unsustainable cycle that persists solely because nobody involved in it seems to mind being caught in it.

If I were to point to a link between Westworld and Fargo (both of which come up frequently in discussions of this sort), it would be that both are based on films and, thus, employ the type of world building that invites the audience to fill in a lot of the blanks based on what they know of the source material. There are some inherent flaws with this sort of storytelling (I think it genuinely hamstrung Westworld’s ultimately rousing story of class revolution), but it can be fun when done well — especially if it turns the audience into an unseen extra character. And still I share many of Thurm and Christman’s frustrations with how thoroughly this model dominates online TV discussion.

The great thing about TV in 2017 is that there are shows for essentially any temperament you can describe. If you don’t like The Handmaid’s Tale, you can check out multiple adaptations of terrific sci-fi and fantasy novels on multiple other networks (American Gods, The Magicians, and The Expanse, to name just three). And I haven’t even delved into the huge number of terrific shows that uneasily straddle the line between comedy and drama, like FX’s Atlanta, The CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and even CBS’s Mom.

What’s more, because TV is much more responsive to overall societal trends — and less concerned with telling stories that will sell easily at the worldwide box office, as major movies are — it’s better equipped to respond to shifts in the American public mindset. That’s why the medium far outpaces film in essentially any sort of “diversity” you want to talk about, in addition to addressing the politics of the moment in more topical series like Black-ish or The Good Fight.

Indeed, the weirdest part of Christman’s argument, in particular, comes when he suggests that artistically adventurous films like Moonlight or The Witch are routinely praised by critics, where TV critics tend to champion blander, less adventurous work, when nothing could be further from the truth. If you go to Metacritic and browse through just a handful of early 2017 releases that have low ratings but killer critical acclaim, you’ll find shows as wide-ranging as The Leftovers, Catastrophe, Samurai Jack, The Americans, and American Crime (a hauntingly shot series that excoriates America’s history of both class- and race-based oppression and airs on ABC, one of the original big three TV networks).

And that’s to say nothing of the numerous, more flawed shows that exist in a less covered but still enjoyable gray area. Thurm points to The CW’s Riverdale, which is not a great show but is a relentlessly fun one, as a panacea to what he finds lacking in Fargo, and I don’t know that he’s wrong. (The CW seems to be making a habit of creating “not great but relentlessly fun” shows of late.)

The rise of “Peak TV” has spawned a lot of bad shows. It’s also spawned some critically acclaimed shows that feel like they were assembled in a factory somewhere. (I like Fargo a lot, but I still find the level of praise devoted to it — especially this ongoing third season — a little strange.) But the net positive is that there are a huge variety of good to great TV shows out there — even if many of them are on the edges of the dominant conversation.

Could the media do a better job of highlighting some of these shows? Absolutely, and I hope TV critics will continue to do the work of bringing them to the forefront. (Whether they can sustain an endless onslaught of stories about them week after week is another matter.) But there’s a key lesson here; after all, if we equated the value and quality of the entire film industry with only the six or seven most-talked-about movies, we’d think that only Marvel and Star Wars movies (and the occasional La La Land) were being made.

It’s important to hold the art we consume to whatever high standard we set for it within ourselves. But it’s also important not to mistake the conversation around something for the thing itself. As the old saying goes, if you don’t like what’s on, change the channel.