I can’t remember when I first heard the phrase ‘Golden Age of Television’, but I do know Labour were in power on both sides of the Border and the iPhone had yet to launch. So if I feel that for most of this century I have been using it, and basking in the golden glow of the small screen dramas it represents, it’s probably because for most of the century I have.
You too.
Like most cultural movements which define a century, this one started in the last one. Probably in 1999, the year Mafia drama The Sopranos first aired in the United States on paid-for cable network HBO. Its primary ingredients were anathema to the mainstream, advertiser-reliant networks – recipe: to a world of violence, swearing and gratuitous nudity add one mesmerising criminal anti-hero – so of course it was catnip for viewers.
More than that, it broke the accepted mould for what TV could be allowed to do. As a result, HBO and others realised there was a market for risk-taking, boundary pushing drama and so ushered in said Golden Age – or the era of discomfort viewing, if you prefer.
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Since then we’ve had uncomfortable, complex, multi-season dramas such as The Wire and Deadwood (both on HBO); the acclaimed ACM trio of Breaking Bad, spin-off Better Call Saul, and Mad Men; and dark crime anthology Fargo (FX). And, since 2007, we’ve had the latecomer to the party which is now the loudest voice in the room: Netflix, home to The Crown, Stranger Things, Orange Is The New Black, Bojack Horseman and Squid Game.
The list of past hits could go on and on. But is the same true of the Golden Age of Television itself? No, says American cultural critic and film historian Peter Biskind.
Biskind is the author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a best-selling 1998 study of Hollywood’s 1970s Golden Age. Now, faced with what he terms “the long winter” of superhero-dominated release schedules, he has turned his attention to the small screen.
His new book is called Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust And Lies That Broke Television, and as the title suggests he doesn’t like what he sees and isn’t optimistic about the future. Biskind portrays a busy, crowded landscape in which Netflix, Big Tech (Amazon and Apple) and ‘the Pluses’ as he calls them (Disney+, Paramount+ etc.) are now behaving more and more like the networks and studios they once affected to despise as they chase revenue and subscribers.
Doing that means they are paying top dollar to attract big names (Nicole Kidman, for example) and opening themselves up to paid-for advertising (or “ad-supported tiers”, in streamer parlance). That in turn brings obligations of the sort which would have been anathema to the creators of The Sopranos and The Wire, shows unlikely to be commissioned today even by a streamer. There is too much content made by too many players, and too much of it is no longer any good. The watchword is quantity, the casualty is quality.
At one point Biskind asks a question: what happens when potential advertisers complain about the content of a show such as, say, HBO’s White Lotus? It becomes de-fanged, is what happens. It gets mainstreamed and the discomfort TV we have grown to love returns to its more comfortable state. For which read (in Biskind’s words): “bland, bloated and innofensive.”
And he quotes actor Laura Linney, who plays adulterous, morally-dubious Wendy Byrd in the crime-does-pay series Ozark, a major hit for Netflix. “Don’t come at me with this fairy tale thing about right and wrong, and that those who cheat get punished,” she snapped to a Los Angeles Times reporter last year who questioned the rectitude of the show’s message. “Are you kidding? Watch the news.”
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What does his mean for our own terrestrial broadcasters and the stuff they try to entice us with when we can be prised away from Netflix or Amazon Prime? Sticking with news, there is both the good and the bad sort on that front.
First the bad. Among British 16- to 24-year-olds, the time spent watching broadcast TV dropped by over 75% between 2010 and 2022, from 169 minutes daily to 39. Pump out as much Line Of Duty or Taskmaster or Ru Paul’s Drag Race as you like, it’s hard to see how you turn that trend around. Even in 2020, the year of lockdown, daily viewing only increased among the over 45s, and it pretty soon tailed off again when the pubs opened. The picture is of terminal decline.
More broadly, it means production spend in Scotland could be diminished. Nobody is suggesting, say, that Amazon’s studio facility in Leith is going to be mothballed any time soon – but the news that the company has pulled production of its landmark, 10-part Blade Runner 2099 series from Belfast will cause some jitters on this side of the Irish Sea.
And good news? There is some. The BBC, with its ad-free service, tolerably efficient iPlayer and willingness to make some if not all of its drama content bingeable, is essentially already a subscription-based streamer. With its multi-channel platform it can showcase edgier work and, if it’s a hit, move it to where the viewers are. Fleabag and Normal People, a co-production with US streamer Hulu, both aired first on BBC Three before moving to BBC One.
And each of the UK’s terrestrial channels stands to benefit from the tendency among new streamers to return to an old ‘play’ – drip-feeding content rather than making it all available at once. With social media now the water cooler around which the watching public congregates, it makes sense to have everyone on the same page (or episode).
But overall it’s thin stuff to pin your hopes on. So perhaps the best we can hope for is an extended Gilded Age to follow this Golden one – a sort of afterglow which lasts as long as we’re happy to pay for content, and as long as that content is gripping/entertaining/discomforting enough to make the spend worthwhile. When that changes, all bets are off. But by then I imagine the viewing public will be getting its thrills from content creators on YouTube – and be too busy to notice.
Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust And Lies That Broke Television is published on November 7 (Allen Lane, £25)
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