The Tartan

Editorials featured in the Forum section are solely the opinions of their individual authors.

So, seen anything good on TV recently?

No, don’t go anywhere, I swear this is important, please, I promise my whole shtick about asking a random question and then rambling is interesting, come back, please, please, please 

Assuming you have not left yet, and that my begging was in fact effective, television is experiencing a bit of a nadir recently. Which is interesting because budgets have gone up, streaming has made television a sort of prestige format, the sort that was restricted to movies before the turn of the millennium, and we’re seeing fewer and fewer schlocky sitcoms and boring reruns being aired. With streaming taking over, we should, logically, be in the golden age of television.

So what’s going on with all the flops?

Is there anything good going on? Well, I think the issue lies in the writers’ rooms: the good, and the bad. Writers have spent the better part of the last half decade talking about AI, new licensing deals, and restructuring their union contracts in order to operate in a post-cable world. The major strikes by the Writers Guild of America (as well as the Screen Actors Guild and other Hollywood unions) was instrumental in the changing shift of television, and writers’ strikes, in the past, have changed the landscape of TV.

Issue the first? Writers’ rooms have a lot less to work with at this point.

See, in the good old days — when baseball was the greatest sport in America, Barry Bonds ate a balanced breakfast, and Seinfeld was the funniest thing since badly sliced bread — you got 22 episodes. Twenty. Two. That’s like, three seasons of a modern TV show. And these were hour-long episodes too! Twenty two hours of content!

Things shifted radically in the new age of prestige television, though, as seasons have gotten shorter, filler has been cut down, and episodes have been stretched further and further to meet time constraints. When you have one hour to fit in the character development and storytelling you’d normally have done over a pair of episodes and a bit of a third, you run the risk of just not telling a compelling story.

This isn’t on the writers! They now have less time, less ability, and less material to experiment with, work on, or screw up. A bad episode of a 22-episode season can be written off, but a bad episode of an eight-episode season could ruin the whole show.

Which means it’s more important than ever to make sure writers’ rooms are well-funded and well-staffed and, oh my God, is this foreshadowing I spy? Are writers’ rooms actually not any of these things?

They’re down to about five people. FIVE! That’s the number of Guys there are! They need all five of them to make a burger! Imagine asking your burger joint to make a TV show. That’s essentially what’s happening in media creation these days.

If you want a serious response, the new landscape of television is biased towards fewer writers working on shorter seasons. It also means that now, one bad writer is a full 20 percent of your staff, not under 10 percent, and it also means that there’s less diversity of ideas. It’s not good. It’s not a good way to get more varied perspectives, and it’s not helping writers grow and develop and build television into a medium that deserves the respect it’s getting. You can spend a quarter billion dollars on a show but if it’s bad you’re not making that quarter billion back.

This is, however, counteracted by the fact writers’ rooms are getting more diverse, and that is an amazing thing. These are new perspectives, new ideas, new writers being injected into a format that is designed to make them fail. It’s really hard to break glass ceilings while the floor is being destroyed under you, and studios boasting about diversity while undermining the diverse groups they’re hiring isn’t helping anyone. It’s just engendering hatred, making people blame diversity in the writers’ room for the stuff execs make their writers do, and it’s hurting TV as a whole.

In a world where TV is becoming the primary thing we watch, and with streaming taking over cinema and the small screen, good, well-funded writers, and good, well-funded shows are the backbone to good quality entertainment, and unfortunately, that’s something we’re sorely lacking right now.