Is Peak TV Too Much TV?

Television has never been better or more. Is Peak TV too much TV?

- Peter Biskind

TV already had a golden age—the flowering of live television that lasted from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s. But it was nothing like this, the golden age we’re in now, dubbed the era of Peak TV in 2015 by John Landgraf, CEO of FX, under whose aegis the channel has aired, among other shows, Justified, The Americans, Fargo and Atlanta. Everywhere we turn there are shows so fine, so well-written and performed, that they have bled talent from the movie business. But nothing lasts forever, especially not golden ages, which, paradoxically, are most often undone by their very success. The movie studios’ last golden age, the era of New Hollywood, ran from the mid-1960s to the beginning of the 1980s and was buried by its own blockbusters—Jaws, Star Wars, et al. The era of Peak TV has already outlived New Hollywood by a good five years, if you date the former as most people do, from the premiere of The Sopranos in 1999. The money that comes with success, it turned out, was and is a double-edged sword. It can enhance quality, but more often it is the enemy of quality. Once big profits begin to rain down from box-office heaven, directors, actors and agents all want their share. Budgets go up, and risk aversion, the Ebola of golden ages, strikes. Nobody expects the current plenitude of quality TV to end tomorrow, but there are worrisome clouds on the horizon. In the Darwinian world of the entertainment business, little fish that fatten on creative success are food for big fish, which are in turn bait for even bigger fish looking for deeper, more lucrative ponds to conquer. Today, the waters are dark with sharks named AT&T, Disney, Apple and Google.