Nothing Gold Can Stay

I read an interesting article at Slate.com last week, the premise of which was that the much-hyped but largely real Golden Age of TV that began at some nebulous point around the turn of the millennium, probably about the time the first episode of The Sopranos (A show I still haven't watched.) aired on HBO, hasn't just peaked or even ended, as has been argued, but has turned into a full-on slide from peak to trough.

When the fulcrum shifted from the networks to subscription services and then to streaming, it very much felt like a tide that would not easily turn. The level of quality expected by viewers rose so substantively it seemed hard to imagine anyone settling for less. 

In many ways that remains a sustainable argument. Certainly, production values and the quality of both script and performance haven't slipped noticeably from the high-water mark of ten or fifteen years ago. All the big-budget shows still benchmark at or above the comparable standard in cinema, a target that would have seemed laughably unattainable in TVs previous "Golden Age", let alone in the regular programming of the wilderness decades of the sixties thru the nineties.

As has been discussed many times in this corner of the blogosphere (We really need to figure out a better way to describe our nebulous collective. If there's one thing spheres definitively do not have, it's corners...) the increasing tendency of all the streaming platforms to commission shows they then decline to renew, often for reasons that remain opaque, is starting to look like an existential crisis for the format. Viewers are making decisions on what to start watching based on their assessment of how likely they are to be able to find resolution when the show concludes, creating a negative feedback loop that only increases the likelihood the shows won't get renewed.

 

Perhaps more damagingly, there's increasing evidence of a concerning tendency of streaming platforms to straight up abandon shows altogether, not just in terms of forward continuity but even in retaining episodes already made for viewing. Along with the rise of streaming, digital distribution and the worldwide web, came an easy expectation that everything would be available forever. Physical media rapidly fell out of fashion and there was much talk of future generations owning nothing but their devices and a handful of contracts and subscriptions to that great media library in the cloud.

I should probably say here that I was one of those people who believed a decade and more ago that we were on the cusp of a true digital revolution. I thought that, while I was too old, my cultural expectations and assumptions too ossified to do much more than creakingly shift a little in place, generations coming up behind would break almost entirely with the need or even the desire to acquire and horde hard copies of the things they loved, and especially of the things they had loved, once, but now thought of only occasionally and in passing.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that was a techno-utopian vision as unlikely to come true as the jetpacks and hovercars we all thought we'd have by the 'nineties at the latest. People like stuff, it seems. There can be no other rational explanation for vinyl's dead cat bounce turning into a tiger on a trampoline. More importantly, at least to rights-holders and producers, as soon as they find financial security, people can't seem to stop themselves buying back their own past. The rolling nostalgia market has to have product to sell.

Now, though, there's a far less abstract justification for buying offline copies of shows you'd like to watch again, one day. It's that or nothing. And the more niche your tastes, the more alert you'll need to be. While some recent panics, like the culling of big-name shows like Westworld as part of a Warner Bros. cost-cutting excercise, have turned out to be false alarms (The shows are, mostly, shifting to a forthcoming non-subscription service.) many less-celebrated shows have simply vanished into the ether, quite possibly never to be seen again.

Since most shows these days don't get a physical release either on Blu-ray or DVD, I guess we're just going to put our hope in those public-spirited fans who love either the shows or their own subscriber numbers so much they're willing to upload entire seasons to their YouTube channels. Even then, I wouldn't count on any of them staying up forever. About the only way you can rely on a show still being there when you want to watch it is if you have it safely tucked away at home.

Looping back to where we started, there's always a disconnect between what's best and what we remember most fondly. Whether the current faltering of TV's second Golden Age is the prelude to a fall or merely a mistep, soon to be corrected, it seems hard to argue against the prevailing wisdom that things aren't as good now as they used to be. 

There are fewer "Must Watch" shows and those that we have seem to land with slightly less cultural impact. Runs aren't just less secure, they might also be shorter. The fracturing of the streaming market into multiple competing platforms awkwardly mimics the broadcast era with its network structure and the proliferation of individual channels within the streaming structure, many requiring subscriptions of their own, casts a rose-tinted haze across our collective memory of the brief quasi-universality of the early 2000s.

Like net neutrality and the yearning of information to be free, it all seems like a message from another, more innocent time. I hesitate to say winter is coming, not just because I'd be quoting a show I've never watched but because in a while, maybe even that meme won't stand.

All of which is fine and well but I actually came here to talk about Daisy Jones and the Six. And Locke and Key. And Camp Camp. I guess I'll just have to save my thoughts on those for another day. Always assuming I can remember what they were. My thoughts, that is. The shows, those I always remember, even when they're gone.