“When the golden age of television started in the late 1990s, all you needed to keep on top of good TV was a premium cable package that included HBO. When streaming entered the game in the early 2010s, you could get by with a basic Netflix subscription for $8 a month, maybe a Hulu subscription if you were a true TV buff. Now, there’s still cable and there’s still Netflix and Hulu — but there’s also Prime and Paramount+ and Disney+ and Apple TV+ and Peacock and Max. Oh, and if you want to keep your Netflix subscription fee low, you have to watch ads now.
It’s all a lot, way more than most people can keep track of. A 2023 Nielsen report found audiences now spend an average of 10.5 minutes searching for something to watch every time they sit down. At least one in five audience members have been so overwhelmed with all the choices the post-streaming world has for them that they’ve chosen to forgo TV to do something else instead.
Under these circumstances, it takes a lot for any one individual show to cut through the noise and find a critical mass of people waiting to watch it, much less discuss it. When they do decide to discuss it, they’re going to different places than they used to.”
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“One of the sticking points for the Writer’s Guild in 2023 was the rise of so-called “mini rooms” as an increasingly standard practice over the last 10 or so years as the streaming platforms began to build their libraries. A classic TV writer’s room can include seven or eight writers, but mini rooms include only two or three writers plus a showrunner.
Mini rooms typically emerged when a show was in limbo waiting to be greenlit, either for production or for a new season. The idea was that the showrunner could take on a few extra writers and a few weeks to plan the season they were pitching,which executives would then evaluate before they committed to filming episodes. The writers for a mini room were hired as freelancers and paid to scale, and there was no guarantee they would stick around if the show continued on to regular production. One of the biggest issues with this practice, the WGA argued, was that mini rooms cut young writers off from the classic apprenticeship system of TV writing.
Young writers were by and large not attractive to showrunners who needed to staff up a mini room to churn out a season’s worth of scripts fast. If young writers did get hired, they didn’t get mentorship from the older and more experienced writers they were working with, because those writers didn’t have time for it. By the time the episodes they wrote went into production, they were no longer working for the show and had no chance to come to the set, see how their script worked in practice, and adjust their practices for the future based on the new information.
The new WGA contract essentially killed off mini rooms, but for the next few years, we’ll be living in the creative ecosystem they birthed. That’s a world where upcoming talent had limited opportunities to learn the craft of their medium, and it has started to show.”
https://www.vox.com/culture/354928/post-peak-mid-tv-quiet-the-bear-succession