Brace Yourself — There's a Lot of TV Coming Your Way
This fall, you can spend your after-work hours (or, heck, all day if you have your own office) watching the revamped Muppet Show on ABC, singing along to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on the CW, or glued to The Bastard Executioner, a violent drama set in the 1300s, on FX. Or you could spend that time watching new offerings from HBO, Showtime, IFC, AMC, Hulu, Amazon, or Netflix. Not to mention the archives of pretty much every show ever made, now streaming online. It’s the golden age of TV, right?
Well, in a recent speech that freaked out Hollywood, John Landgraf, the CEO of FX, said there is “simply too much television.” The golden age is really a glut, he argued, overwhelming consumers — and, Landgraf predicted, imperiling TV creators’ ability to stay in business.
Kurt Andersen: Let’s say there is too much television. So what? What’s the worst that could happen?
John Landgraf: Objectively, I don’t think the business model can sustain this many programs. So I think there will be a peak, and I think peak television will be reached sometime this year or next year.
There’s a body of literature on the so-called paradox of choice that says when you give somebody too many choices, you diminish the amount of joy they get out of the choices they make. I think we’re giving people so much choice that we’re creating this paradox where making a choice becomes work.
It’s certainly different than back in the day when there were three networks.
Sure. In general, I think more points of view is a good thing. Stories are empathy machines that allow us to see through the eyes of other people. But I would also argue that television, at least historically, has been a mass medium. And it’s had a unique role to play in society.
If you look at the number of people currently watching Transparent, it would fall below the optimum. And yet, I’m not arguing that Transparent shouldn’t exist. I think TV can and should make shows that are watched by 3 or 4 million people. I just think if you can’t make shows that are going to be watched by 20 million people, the medium is different. It becomes part of this fractured world that we live in, where everybody goes to their corner, and the liberal people watch the liberal news and the conservative people watch the conservative news, and we’re not having a common experience anymore.
Are you going to slow down the number of new shows?
I am going to try. There’s an implication in the question that we are part of the problem, and I accept that. We went from zero to 20 shows, so it’s hard for me to complain. On the other hand, we’re at the absolute limit of what we can do well.
Have you had an experience of having a good show on the air that couldn’t get the attention that you thought it deserved because of the clutter?
A recent example for me is The Comedians, which starred Billy Crystal and Josh Gad. A lot of people didn’t like the pilot very much and didn’t have the time to keep watching. There were some magnificent episodes of that show that were made toward the end, but we just couldn’t get anybody’s attention.
You just don’t have the time to stick with something that’s not immediately satisfying.
If it’s not perfect for you now, then you just say, I’m going to set this aside and keep exploring. To some extent, you find yourself infinitely and endlessly exploring for that perfect thing.
