At the beginning of this summer, I wrote out a list of upcoming television and web series I intended on watching, along with their premiere dates, just to help myself keep track of them. I ended up with a list of over a dozen shows, about one per week for the entire summer. And that's roughly about when I decided that I had to face up to the fundamental truth that my TV consumption was, despite my best efforts, really starting to rival my intake of feature films.
And this is not necessarily a bad thing. It's become very clear over the last few years that commercial television is often just as strong as film in delivering quality entertainment. In many cases it's a much more economically viable avenue to tell certain kinds of stories. And though there's still a cultural gap, the prestige of doing a really great piece of longform drama isn't all that different from doing a theatrical film. The quality of the work produced by all the creatives involved is the same. We've seen this year with "Chernobyl" and "When They See Us" that they can have the same kind of artistic and social impact. So really, they ought to be treated the same - including on this blog.
In practicality, however, television is so much harder to consume and write about, especially in aggregate. There's way too much of it for all but the most dedicated television critics to stay on top of. I gave up trying to follow the Emmy races because watching so many nominated shows was just too much of a commitment. And with network television and cable losing ground to streaming services every day - and more streaming services still on their way - the landscape remains very unstable. It's easy to talk about what's going on in the industry, but harder to track the specific implications and trends that result, especially as ratings metrics are harder to come by.
This year, for example, we lost a bunch of good shows before their time, like "Counterpart," "Swamp Thing," and "The Tick," but unlike last year almost none were able to jump networks - "One Day at a Time" was the only major title that managed it. However, the reasons for each cancellation are completely different. "Counterpart" was snuffed because Starz was acquired by Lionsgate, and was dumping shows they didn't produce. "The Tick" seems to have been a case of Amazon cutting back on expenses after several costly projects. "Swamp Thing" had the most dramatic cancellation, due to a combination of economics and company politics that remain murky. Are those murky reasons the same as the ones that got all the Netflix Marvel shows cancelled? It's hard to say.
I feel bad about skipping a lot of chances to talk about TV lately. Since cutting back on the number of posts I've been writing, I've stopped covering the fall network premieres, didn't write anything about the Upfronts or the corresponding programming shifts, and I've even dropped my Top Ten lists for older television content. Because I haven't been able to be as comprehensive as I've wanted, I've just cut more topics. I have a couple of ideas for pieces about specific streaming services coming up, but nothing that's really focusing on the shows outside of my typical season reviews. And I'm going to stop apologizing for the TV content sometimes overwhelming the film content - that's just going to be inevitable some months.
So, I've decided to add two or three new features into the rotation, ones I've been considering adding for a while. The first is at least one "Trailers! Trailers!" post each year devoted to television series. This will probably be posted in the summer months, after Upfronts or Comic-Con when we tend to get new clips. Another, which you're going to be seeing soon because the Emmys are upon us, will be a "What I Didn't See" post for television and web series to go with the one I usually write every year for movies. If I'm going to keep complaining about not having time to watch these shows, I should at least write about the shows themselves in some capacity. There's also going to be a yearly television "Best of" or "Top Ten" list, but I haven't decided the format yet.
What really prompted this was a few recent conversations I've had where it became apparent that there wasn't really a line between film stardom and television stardom anymore, and the implications of all that - but I'll save further discussion for its own post, coming shortly.
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