Picture it: you return home after the longest day in a history of long days, and you flip on your boxy TV to drown your troubles in canned laughter, but your options are limited to three channels.
The three network channels once dominated television, but everything changed when cable television came into its own in the ‘80s. Once a marginalized joke—cheap content made by cheap talent—cable is a massive force today, and certainly nothing to be laughed at. It changed everything.
And everything’s changing again.
“Cable and network TV is feeling a similar kind of heat that cable created nearly 30 years ago,” said Brad Buckner, a prolific television writer for series such as Supernatural. “In order to get noticed, streaming TV product is frequently edgier and more exciting than a lot of cable series, so the bar's been raised.”
Online streaming sites are increasingly producing original content to compete with network and cable TV.
Netflix, a site with 33.4 million subscribers, already won an Emmy for their first series House of Cards, the first online-only series to bag the coveted award. Within a week of the series’ second season premiere, two percent of those 33.4 million subscribers had already binge-watched every episode.
Nielsen ratings began measuring viewership through broadband and not simply basic cable, acknowledging the growing population of viewers relying on the internet for their TV.
Whether viewers realize it or not, viewers are watching a new kind of television, and they themselves are watching differently.
According to Buckner, in terms of popular awareness, the cliché is that “quality television has become the novel of the 21st century.”
As such, the buzz surrounding a popular TV series—network, cable, or online—is nearly inescapable if you’re not agoraphobic. If you are, consider yourself lucky you didn’t have Breaking Bad spoiled for you. Television today generates serious discussion in ways Leave It to Beaver or even E.R. never did.
The upswing in content is a direct result of the relatively new medium called the internet. Online television is a different beast with different rules.
Online-only series aren’t subject to the same kind of episode-to-episode censorship that cable and networks are famous for, and without network suits to contain their warped minds, writers and directors release edgier, more experimental shows with more cinematic production values.
Plus, streaming sites allow viewers to practically overdose on their favorite series. This binge-watching results in an audience willing to see more serialized content—shows with heavy continuity that add up to more than the sum of their parts.
“I watched House of Cards until my eyes fell out of my head,” Buckner recalled. “Series have become larger animals than just collections of episodes.”
Part of it is, again, based on competition. When viewers have thousands of choices, networks constantly look for new ways to keep them tuning in.
“Straight procedural shows are falling by the wayside,” said ABC employee Matt Brown. “Even successful network shows like Blacklist or Scandal started case of the week and slowly abandoned it for long term storytelling.”
Innovative and intricate plotting is increasingly attractive to top talent, whether they be writers, directors, or actors. Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey, the star of House of Cards, has all but condemned Hollywood in no uncertain terms in favor of television.
Compare that to 20 years ago, when an actor like Tom Hanks might start off in television, but never look back the second he landed a starring role in Splash.
Talent, however, doesn’t come cheap. Television is upping its game across the board, particularly in production value.
“The demand of audiences is that content grows more and more sophisticated and production value constantly tops itself,” Buckner said. “This isn't an inexpensive game to play, and paying for all this greatness gets trickier every day.”
When audiences demand such high production value, some networks shift towards fewer episodes in a season.
“A bigger budget’s placed on each episode,” Brown explained. “Shows that look pretty get a lot of attention, so as the number of episodes of a season start to drop down, production value can go up.”
While networks and streaming services spend bloated sums, a new kind of television founded on shoestring budgets and amateur actors gains more popularity each day. The web series.
YouTube and other video streaming sites aren’t limited to videos of cats being weird and babies being cute anymore. Instead, the sites allow aspiring talents without funding a chance to get content seen on a wide scale.
“Internet shareability is so easy that if you have good content people will tend to see it,” said Almog Avidan-Antonir, a film graduate who found success with his own comedy web series titled Long Story Short.
There’s even profit to be made from advertising money, especially if the series can keep their budgets in check.
“Once you have a certain amount of subscribers, you can start slapping ads on your videos. We only spend 30 bucks an episode for pizza, and everything else we borrow from friends,” Antonir laughed. “I’m a strong believer in creating solid content without spending a huge amount of money.”
Antonir’s series’ episodes doesn’t run longer than four minutes, but he’s considering longer content as more web series find viewers willing to sit through longer content, equivalent to proper television. Wildly successful web series Video Game High School jumped from 10 minute episodes to 44 minutes, using crowd-funding to compensate for budget increases.
“Watching habits seem to be somewhat the same regardless of platform,” Antonir observed.
Competitors are taking web series more seriously as well. Video Game High School was picked up for Netflix streaming, while Broad City recently made the jump from web series to Comedy Central mainstay.
Television, good television no less, can come from anywhere now. The mass audiences has fragmented in the digital age, as they have thousands of choices and counting.
Modern television is a landscape full of niche programs, and many find enduring success with small but intensely loyal fan-bases. Even networks, infamous for the broadest content imaginable, are realizing they can play ball.
"So long as a network has a few hit workhorse shows to pay the bills," Buckner explained, "they're willing to program shows for smaller audiences that were once completely unacceptable."
Networks realize the changing landscape of television, conforming to the new normal by airing content online and developing out-of-the-box shows. This increased competition doesn’t necessarily mean anyone’s going to be left out of the fold in a new Golden Age of television.
“The only ones who will be wiped out are the ones who won't adapt or keep up,” said Buckner. “If they're still looking at TV as they did ten or twenty years ago, they're no longer in the game.”
It seems instead that the new competition has forced everyone to sharpen their game, and the audience is the beneficiary.
So while TV providers sweat bullets trying to keep up with digital television and ballooning budgets in their efforts create the next Mad Men, viewers can sit back and enjoy the shows. After all, there are thousands of them out there.