RIP, CBS All Access: The ViacomCBS streaming service leaves a ‘Good Fight’ legacy

Entertainment Weekly

The ViacomCBS streaming service, which launched way back in 2014, will be rebranded as Paramount+ starting on Thursday. But as Darren Franich notes, CBS All Access leaves behind a notable legacy. "Non-subscribers don't realize CBS All Access offered a robust slate of concept-y originals," says Franich. "Strange Angel was the historical drama about the actual mystical rocket scientist who palled around with L. Ron Hubbard. Tell Me a Story told old fairy tales in modern-day Manhattan, or something. I watched four episodes of One Dollar, and I do remember the dollar. Coyote imagined what if Breaking Bad were bad. My mom swears by Why Women Kill. Practically the first thing Jordan Peele did after Get Out was sign on for a new Twilight Zone, an exciting project until anyone saw it. I recall hope for Josh Boone's The Stand, which certainly happened. Stephen Colbert's Tooning Out the News is… a cartoon about news? I'm being cruel to be kind here. It was a tough era to not be Netflix. Just ask Hulu, the pre-eminent not-Netflix...smarter analysts than me will sort CBS All Access into the history of the streamer wars. Was it an inevitable failure, wasting a head start while Disney+ and HBO Max scaled Netflix's mountain? Or a missing link leftover from the brief assumption that internet TV would just be all the old networks with new subscription fees? If Paramount+ takes off, its predecessor will get remembered into a necessary stopgap, ramping up Star Trek's visibility while the larger corporation prepped iCarly and Frasier reboots. For me, CBS All Access was The Good Fight. And The Good Fight was the best argument for CBS All Access as a style, a mood, a whole artistic perspective." ALSO: CBS All Access may have been too ahead of its time.