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TV TATTLE

Do the streaming wars signal the end of TV's Golden Age?

  • "The good news is that if you like having new stuff to watch, you will have a lot of new stuff to watch—so much, in fact, that it may take a while to notice that much of it is not that great," says Sam Adams. "The Golden Age of TV, the halcyon period that dates from the premiere of The Sopranos in January 1999, has been drawing to a close for a while now, but as the streamers lay out their plans for the 21st century’s third decade, it’s increasingly clear that it’s well and truly over." He adds: "In the past year or so, the dust has started to settle, and the landscape it’s revealed is dispiritingly familiar. There’s Amazon, canceling I Love Dick and One Mississippi as it seals a deal to expand The Lord of the Rings. There’s Netflix, cutting off One Day at a Time and The OA as it signs the creators of Game of Thrones. As once-insurgent streamers prepare to do battle with traditional media companies armed with several decades of established hits (and no longer willing to license their past glories for anything less than top dollar), they are behaving a lot like the entities they once aimed to disrupt, writing nine-figure checks to big-name talent and licensing all the intellectual property they can get their hands on. The future of streaming is less Tuca & Bertie, more Benioff & Weiss."

    TOPICS: Peak TV, Apple TV+, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, Peacock, Prime Video