Why Television Is Better Now Than Ever Before

We're living in a great time for television.

If this were politics, and someone where to stand up and shout about how great everything is today, a vocal group of white-haired men would rise up to shout the notion down and remind the speaker about how great things used to be. But this isn't politics, and most cultural critics agree that we're experiencing a new golden age or revolutionary era for TV. The only thing up for debate is what to call it.

But why has there been so little argument against this being the greatest moment in television history? Why do so many lists of the greatest television shows of all time cull three-quarters of their honorees from the post-Sopranos era? Why now?

As with any revolutionary moment in art (or any revolutionary moment of any kind, really), there are a number of cultural factors that have converged to bring about this apex. The tools used to create and promote the medium have changed dramatically in recent years. Other art forms have suffered setbacks, setting the stage for television to step into the void. Public perception of the form has shifted and a new crop of hungry young artists are growing up talking about becoming showrunners when ten years ago most people didn't even know the position existed. Television, a form that was once a critical red-headed step child, is laying claim to an ever growing share of cultural capital.

It's hard to argue that we aren't living in the best times television has ever seen. Let's take a look at why television is better now than ever before.

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Written by Brenden Gallagher (@muddycreekU)

Depending on who you talk to, the network television model is either dying or shrinking. Regardless of how pessimistic your outlook on the future of the networks might be, everyone agrees that the days of the 20 million viewer show are all but over. So far, the decline in viewership has only helped the quality of network television. The struggles of NBC over the last decade have been well-documented: the channel has fallen precipitously from Must-See TV grace. Most of the network's best shows have been their lowest rated in recent years, and though in better times they would have been headed for the chopping block after a sub-par season or two, the Peacock has had no choice but to keep them on the air. Chuck, Friday Night Lights, Parks and Recreation, Community, and Parenthood have all enjoyed sizable runs despite low ratings.

With FOX and ABC following NBC down the ratings rabbit hole, we may see a lower ratings threshold that allows for programs with cult followings to last for longer and longer. Even CBS, which has weathered the ratings plunge far better than its competitors, seems to see the winds of change, as it continues to nurture the low-rated but loyally viewed The Good Wife and add a prestige show or two to its development slate every pilot season (this year's entrant is the Toni Collette led Hostages). We doubt that the networks are going to replace their slates of acronym cop shows with Enlightened clones any time soon, but we expect to see more challenging, well-wrought material with each passing season.

Ratings aren't dead, but they are in need of a radical overhaul. There was a time when a random smattering of Nielsen boxes gave us a good idea of the country's TV viewing habits, but those days are long gone. Unless its a contest show, sporting event, or Game of Thrones, appointment viewing is a thing of the past. We watch television on Netflix and DVR. These new TV delivery systems have taken audiences away from the weekly program appointments to binge watching, rolling through many episodes at once. The effects of this on advertising, and by extension financing, are still being sussed out, but the creative impact has been undeniably positive.

Serialization has become an increasingly important part of TV storytelling. Now that we can easily watch and re-watch seasons of television, shows with complex storytelling, like The Wire, or self-referential road maps, like Arrested Development have increased cache. As the measurement of ratings and the allocation of ad dollars continues to account for viewership after the original air date, binge watching will matter just as much from a financial perspective as premiere ratings. We can expect the complexity and quality of television narratives to increase as a result. Modern television viewing is as much about watching a season as it is about watching an episode, and the long term craft of a series now has as much value as a cliffhanger.

Critics and artists have had a contentious relationship since the first critic told the inventor of the wheel that, while functional, the aesthetics of his work left something to be desired. Even the most critic-hating showrunner around (btw, that would be Kurt Sutter, of Sons of Anarchy) has to admit that the influx of great TV criticism has been good for television. Just as television as an art form has been luring artists away from other mediums, critics have left film and music journalism beats to write about TV. Andy Greenwald, of Grantland, and Mo Ryan, of Huffington Post, are two of the most notable former music critics who have found their way into writing about television, but they aren't alone.

The steadily improving quality of television has also attracted more critics to the form early in their careers: Alan Sepinwall, of HitFix, would have likely found his way into another job if it weren't for the NYPD Blue fan site he ran in college (which still exists online).

How do better critics make for better art? Critics do the leg work of finding great television for us, and then challenge us to expect more from series creators as new seasons air. The average TV viewer wasn't going to tune into that cable channel that plays all those old movies to watch Matthew Weiner's Mad Men unless they were guided there. As the saga of Don Draper and company has continued, engaging with criticism in the form of recaps and podcasts has become part of the show's fan experience. Here we are, six years after we first walked the halls of Sterling Cooper and there are so many recaps written about Mad Men that enterprising writers have taken to recapping the recaps.

Critics are the connection between us and our future favorite shows. Without them, all we would have are advertising dollars and word of mouth to tell us about new series, and many of the best programs on the air would also be the most quickly cancelled, as was the case in the time of Freaks and Geeks.

If you throw a digital rock on the Internet these days, you will hit a "canary in the coal mine" speech from an esteemed film director. Whether you prefer your cinematic doomsday oratory from Soderbergh or Spielberg, the message is the same: The inflating costs of filmmaking are bad for filmmakers. The economics of film, according to these two directors, the studios, and economists, have made it very difficult to post a profit.

Soderbergh estimates that a $30 million film (which is a rather modest budget, as far as studio features go) needs to return $75 million to make a profit. To give you a sense of what a $30 million movie feels like, here are a few examples: Midnight in Paris, The Royal Tenenbaums, and O Brother, Where Art Thou. The odds of getting a quality return on a film of this size amounts to a pretty big gamble that most studios aren't comfortable making several dozen times a year. Studios are more comfortable producing a few tent-pole superhero movies for hundreds of millions of dollars and bombarding audiences with press until they turn a profit. To give you a sense of what a $200 million dollar movie feels like, here are few examples: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Hobbit.

Where do creators who want to tell small stories turn? Indie darling Lena Dunham answered that question for us after turning her film festival success with Tiny Furniture into a TV deal with HBO. It seems when Soderbergh claimed to be retiring from filmmaking, he simply meant it was time to pivot over to television. Spielberg, for his part, recently claimed that Lincoln was almost an HBO film. FX, HBO, and AMC are locked in an arms race to see which network can lure the next big Hollywood name to the small screen. Ang Lee, the Coen Brothers, and Soderbergh are just a few cinema heavyweights who have already flirted with the move. Expect other artists to follow suit.

The tricky economics of filmmaking will likely continue to be a boon for television fans as Iron Man 7 - 400 flood the multiplex.

New media, including web series, sketches, branded content, and the rest of the stuff coming out of the world wide wild west has created a de facto minor league feeder system for television. This is more true of comedy than it is of drama; the dozens of Brooklynites creating web series as we speak have memorized these indie comedy success stories by heart.

From the rise of Lonely Island to the recent pilot order for Broad City, the Internet has created a path from obscurity to network that didn't exist in television before. It seems like every month we see another web series creator plucked to star in, write for, or develop a show for the big leagues. We've got an office pool going for when the High Maintenance creative team will get their deal, and we wager we'll see that bet resolved soon. The math is simple: more fresh voices equals better content.

The Internet is also keeping comedy creatives fresh after they've broken into the industry. The various webisodes created by The Office over the run of the series are a prime example of this. Now that we insatiably crave easily digestible content, writers and producers are often tasked with creating web video to accompany a series: these quick hitting videos are a great platform for test-driving characters and plot. If a quick bit goes viral as a webisode, it could easily find its way into the next season's plot arc. Granted, outside of Battlestar Galactica's stunning web content and the few drama web series like Big Country Blues, drama hasn't found the same new media synergy, but we imagine it's only a matter of time until a symbiotic relationship with web content is de rigueur for all television shows.

New media has improved dramatic television in a different way. The last several years have seen web companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu take the next step in the relationship between television and web content. These companies aspire to be more than a feeder system for traditional television channels—they want to run them out of business.

Hulu was the first to make a run at the original series game, and the results were less than spectacular. This year has seen efforts from Amazon and Netflix that look like they may alter the television landscape permanently, and for the better.

Netflix's House of Cards was a critical and commercial success, while their new season of Arrested Development drew tons of eyeballs despite drawing mixed reviews.

Amazon's pilot contest experiment is still a work in progress, and regardless of how it turns out, there's no denying that the comedies they ordered to series, Alpha House and Betas, certainly trump the average stale network sitcom based on their pilots (though that's saying very, very little).

New media's imprint on television has yet to be fully felt, but the numerous changes the Internet has wrought on television have generally been for the better.

Yes, if we see one more "save our favorite show" Twitter campaign we're going to cave in our faces with iPads, too. Still, no one can deny social media's positive impact on the medium.

Social media has strengthened the communication between shows and potential fans. In the pre-Myspace era, a show like Awkward or Friday Night Lights would've likely suffered an early death after a season or two, left to languish in the TV morgue awaiting its obligatory A.V. Club retrospective. Nowadays Twitter fan clubs coalesce around even the most obscure shows as soon as they emerge from the womb of pilot season. If you manage to avoid hearing about a little gem of a show through hashtags and @ replies, fear not, bloggers like ourselves will be writing lists about overlooked shows. Social media is keeping good shows on the air longer.

Not only does social media connect fans with shows they will fall in love with, it also connects series with their fans. We aren't suggesting that Twitter has a tangible impact on the arc of a show as its being written: shows operate at least a few episodes ahead of air date, and some shows get their entire season in the can before the first episode premieres. But we are suggesting that social media has an undeniable effect on future programming. It's widely accepted that social media hastened Smash's downfall as tweeters poked holes in the show mercilessly. It's hard to imagine we're going to be seeing any Broadway dramas on the air anytime soon after the perpetual embarrassment that was Smash.

The same is true in reverse. When the Internet is pleased with an episode of Parks and Recreation or Justified, it could well mean more Ron Swanson and Boyd Crowder in the future. Twitter and Facebook provide an exhaustive analysis of every episode of every series on the air. Our collective thoughts about what is and isn't working on a show have gone beyond the 500-word review and now television creators have a deep, near instantaneous understanding of when their storytelling and character building has been a success from myriad perspectives. At the end of season, creators are left with detailed blueprints for how to succeed in the future: all they have to do is follow the hashtags.

The current slate of programming at HBO isn't the strongest on television. FX is hitting more home runs more often these days. That doesn't change the fact that HBO pioneered the model of prestige programming. With The Sopranos, Oz, and Sex and the City, HBO was the first network to target (relatively) small, dedicated, mature television audiences. As more and more choice has flooded the landscape, the possibility of creating huge, tent-pole hits has become slimmer and the audience for an average television show smaller. Audiences that were once unacceptably small have become desirable, and the other cable channels and, to a lesser extent, the networks, have come around to the HBO model.

What is the HBO model? Vulture created a rundown of what a show with the prestige stamp ought to include, such as a middle-aged anti-hero and an occasion near the end of an era. More generally, a show in the prestige mold needs to feel cinematic. It needs to look more expensive and sound more intelligent than your average series so that it attracts a rabid fan base that is fiercely proud of the program's craftsmanship. The show needs to feel unique enough that ink will be spilled, T-shirts will be bought, and tumblrs will be created. In a perpetually shifting media landscape, television channels are looking for shows that create brand loyalty; HBO taught the industry that the best way to do that is to to create a brand worth being loyal to.

From Matthew Weiner's pre-season critical gag orders to Kurt Sutter's colorful tirades, the outspoken, overprotective showrunner is becoming a fixture of television lore. Our collective vision of the showrunner as meticulous, tortured artist looks more and more like our long held stereotype of auteur film directors every day. There has been ample argument from industry professionals and critics alike as to the accuracy of this vision of a television show's top man. Is the showrunner an auteur or is she a "fil-teur" as Terry Gilliam famously described his directorial style? Craig Fehrman's recent piece for The New Republic, "The Showrunner Fallacy" looks towards dismantling the deification of showrunners, while Myles McNutt and other critics think the veneration is somewhat warranted, even if our showrunner awe obscures the value of other creative voices.

For the purposes of spurring television's greatness, the actual power of a showrunner is irrelevant. What matters is the perceived power of a show's head honcho. Shows like Mad Men and The Sopranos offer a product that looks and feels like the result of a singular vision in the same way that Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese's films do. Artists see these series and come flocking to television for the freedom and financial support to express their artistic vision. Regardless of the actual power of a showrunner as opposed to a film director, a playwright, or a novelist, film directors, playwrights, and novelists are leaving their forms en masse to try their hand at television. The Coen Brothers, David Mamet, and George R.R. Martin are just a few of the visionary artists to be lured to television to join the ranks of Matt Weiner, David Milch, and Lena Dunham on television's artistic gravy train. If the showrunner doesn't wield that much power, as Fehrman argues, someone had better tell the rest of the country's artistic luminaries before there is no one left practicing any other art form.