Is the golden age of TV series really over?

What we will remember about the golden age of TV series, sparked by groundbreaking shows like The Sopranos, is that it saw its final flames with the onset of a massive production for any type of screen, big or small. A saturation so intense that it did not equate to a higher quality selection, but rather a large binge that preferred reckless abundance over market strategies, leaving viewers full of content but with a bitter aftertaste. Like a menu with too many options causing confusion instead of delight, the web with its platforms expanded viewing opportunities but decreased the gems to discover, forcing the audience to fine-tune their choices to avoid just the trendy title of the moment. It’s pointless to demonize online streaming, without which we wouldn't have had the boom of House of Cards and Orange is the New Black on Netflix. Although cults like Stranger Things arrived in no time, along with other more purely popular projects (not that the Duffer brothers' series isn’t, but it still stands out compared to similar operations like 13 Reasons Why or Élite), the drift that hit the platforms dictated the trend of every distribution window. Inevitably, redefining the boundaries of digital entertainment. 

The writers’ and actors’ strike in 2023, lasting 146 days inside and beyond the studio barricades, was the eruption of symptoms that the show business industry had already begun to show. It resulted in blocks, project cancellations, and internal disagreements whose conclusion sought to rebalance a sector that was already in disarray. While members of the Writer Guild of America (WGA) can finally address their residual rights and actors ensure they’re not digitally reproduced without consent, the whole industry had to come to terms with itself, in addition to facing a continuously declining user base, while the prices of their packages rose dramatically. In April 2024 alone, Netflix recorded a 6% loss in downloads and an 8% drop in monthly active users, according to Sensor Tower, a leading analytics and data intelligence firm. Disney+ also saw a 26% loss in active users, a trend that, although continuously changing, seems unlikely to return to the subscription highs of the pandemic period. It’s too easy today to argue that quality alone is the only bulwark for the return of the aforementioned golden age. Streaming platforms - along with their creators, writers, and even more so producers - had to sit down to try to focus on the feasible, hoping it would have at least minimal appeal and optimize the damage. Because no, you can't live solely on the shoulders of Bridgerton, or at least not forever.

It’s precisely from the Regency-era series that it's worth starting to see what strategies online seriality has borrowed from its older sibling, cinema - once again, one might add. Riding the wave of success from Shondaland's show, it’s time for the stories of writer Julia Quinn to expand on the small screen with sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and any other wish expressed by the court, ranging from Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story released last year to the potential, albeit unconfirmed, story centered on Lady Violet, mother of the Bridgerton siblings, in her youth. Expanding their universes is a path streaming has decided to pursue, not learning from the two thousand Marvel serial products on Disney+ which, after the initial excitement, contributed to the widely spread superhero fatigue, even affecting cinema (yet it doesn't prevent Agatha: Coven of Chaos from arriving on the platform starting in September). Indeed, with Queen Charlotte, Netflix saw far ahead, and the same can be said of the twin-operation Berlin, a spin-off of the much more famous Money Heist. Accumulating 348 million hours watched and 53 million total views, the show with Pedro Alonso secured a second season and the continuation of a world of money and heists that, potentially, can be carried on indefinitely. But are we sure that "indefinite" is what the viewer wants? Don’t ask Shonda Rhimes or Ryan Murphy, who between their Grey's Anatomy and 9-1-1 would continue endlessly. 

Lacking originality, even when proposing theoretically "new" stories through sequels, prequels, and spin-offs, is not just the streaming’s problem, considering the second season of House of the Dragon is on everyone's lips this summer of 2024. But it's also evident that a Gen V, a "youthful" spin-off of The Boys, does not have the same depth as power intrigues soaked in blood when dragons are involved. It confirms that not all worldbuilding needs to be explored more than the main story itself. In a scramble where "every man for himself" was skipped in favor of an alarming and systematic "scorched earth" approach, Netflix was the first to cancel an implausible number of its non-flagship series, sacrificing many to cling to the success of the few. One major problem remains: it's fine to have reduced productions, it's fine to have curbed any type of proposal from every corner of the globe, but the audience has already left. Not only those who canceled their subscriptions but also those who can no longer keep up with any must-watch title, which indeed they miss. Imagine the glory The Gentleman by Guy Ritchie could have had in March 2024, if people were not tired of starting yet another banal, overdone series, almost certainly to be canceled after the first season, so why start it, not even to feel bad afterward. - And then yes, oh, I still have the fourth and final season of Sex Education to catch up on, can't wait. What? It came out last September? How did I miss it. - The involution of serial productions might be the real ace up the streamers’ sleeve, because there’s nothing wrong with often ending up doing the tenth rewatch of Friends or Sex and the City on platforms that hold their rights, but we hope there are always new worlds and characters to tell about. 

Who knows if Netflix might have found a temporary solution, a suitable and unexpected formula, ideal in such an era of overabundance. Released in sequence a few weeks apart, Ripley, Baby Reindeer and Eric, miniseries have shown that a short, contained format with a set number of episodes and a story that opens and closes as they used to could be the only answer to the problem. Cases like Big Little Lies teach us that even a miniseries can become "long," but having a first season that doesn’t seem like one endless, insignificant, and stretched-out episode, but instead has a narrative arc that starts and finishes in a set time frame, is the most desirable. All this unless, of course, you are Apple TV+: you make series of every kind, most of them wonderful (Severance, Pachinko, Ted Lasso, Shrinking, and Black Bird, just to name a few), even if almost no one watches them. And, if they were to be canceled, as they came, they would go without anyone noticing.