Variety recently published its list of the 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. Five of the top 10 shows on the list are from 1998-2015, an era that has become known as Peak TV, defined by shows like “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood,” “The Wire,” and “Mad Men.” Shows in which unlikeable characters misbehave in ways not before seen on network TV. Columbia County-based author Peter Biskind (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) has written a new book on the rise and fall of the era of Peak TV: Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV. Biskind and I spoke on the phone in early December. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Brian K. Mahoney: What was the impetus to write Pandora’s Box? I associate your writing career with magazines and also then writing books about movies. I didn’t realize that you had been covering television.
Peter Biskind: Yeah, I had not been writing about television, but over the last couple of years, it seemed that movies had deteriorated into a kind of monoculture of superheroes and big blockbusters, and so I ended up watching a lot more television and it became apparent to me that the television I was watching was a lot better than what was being shown in movie theaters. So I ended up watching TV, first the cable channels and then the streaming channels almost every night. And I thought, this stuff is really good. I should write a book about it.
I found a real resonance in your depiction of TV anti-heroes with your book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which deals with the seventies anti-heroes in cinema. And it seems like there’s a real jumping off point for “Oz” and “The Sopranos” and the rise of Peak TV with the anti-heroes. Did you notice a similarity when you were thinking about this?
It didn’t, no. I mean, I didn’t really think of it in those terms. I mean, I’ve always liked those kinds of shows, I guess. And certainly, TV has furnished its quota of anti-heroes. There is a kind of thread that goes from the seventies jumps over the eighties—which I consider kind of a dead zone—and started again in the nineties with the explosion of indie film and then took off again, died out in the teens to some degree, and then took off again with cable and streaming. So there’s definitely a thread there from one decade to the next. I guess the most interesting element of that is now really where it seems as if what I call “comfort viewing” as opposed to anti-hero discomfort viewing is getting more and more airtime and threatens to replace the anti-hero with the Ted Lassos of the world.
“Ted Lasso” has been lauded by critics, the show’s won awards. Is “Ted Lasso” not good television?
Well, everybody’s taste is different, and a lot of people like “Ted Lasso,” and there’s certainly something to be said for comfort viewing. And because it’s been lauded by a lot of critics, doesn’t mean that it’s good. From my point of view, it’s not nearly as interesting as the discomfort anti-hero shows that preceded it, like “The Sopranos,” like “Deadwood,” like all the shows of HBO’s golden age, and then after that, moving to basic cable with shows like “The Shield,” “Justified,” “The Americans,” “Damages” and so on, which I tend to prefer over these feel-good shows.
Right. Let’s talk a little bit about HBO’s golden age. You kick off your book by noting that before “The Sopranos” it was “Oz” that kicked off this kind of age of peak television. What set “Oz” apart?
“Oz” was a prison drama, and it was a show run by Tom Fontana. And when he went to HBO and he met with Chris Albrecht, who was head of programming, Albrecht said to him, “Don’t worry about unlikable characters as long as they’re interesting, do it.” And he also said, “What’s the worst thing a showrunner can do or a writer can do?” Which, and Albrecht said, “To kill off your lead character in the first episode.” So Fontana immediately proceeded to kill off his lead character in the first episode, had him burn to death.
“Oz” was filled with violent, unpleasant people. I mean, one of the episodes, an Aryan Nation thug burns a swastika into the rear end of another character, another prisoner with a tip of a cigarette. I mean, these were not nice people, and yet the show was a big hit, and it did sort of set, it kind of liberated, I think, HBO and later cable TV in general from a lot of the stereotypes that characterize network.
In your book, you quote Netflix founder Reed Hastings saying that Netflix’s most formidable enemy was sleep. It’s interesting how Netflix completely changed the game with bingeing and how incredibly, and obviously I think COVID has something to do with this, but how incredibly receptive we all were to this idea of bingeing and suddenly we’re watching four or five hours of television in a row.
In a way, it was sort of horrifying that you’d sit there and sit and watch and watch and watch, and then suddenly you realize, I’ve been watching TV for four or five hours in a row. It’s just as you said, and you think, what am I wasting my time for? But it was so compelling to have the opportunity to watch big chunks of a show instead of just having them drip, drip, drip out at you one episode a week, that it was thrilling to see it.
One of the sad things about Netflix is that because over the years when it turned out that Netflix was not the financial bonanza that people thought it was going to be, suddenly they’ve changed their business model and their whole production model and taken back some of the things that gave us, for example, Netflix was ad free. That was great. And suddenly they’re introducing an ad ad-supported tier, and they’ve stopped bingeing because it was too expensive to drop a whole season of a series that could cost $100 or $200 million. It was just too expensive, and Netflix wasn’t doing well.
In fact, never made a profit really. And I’m not sure even now, whether they’re making a profit because they’re very secretive in terms of their numbers, how many people are watching, how much money they’re making, et cetera, et cetera.
Netflix spent $17 billion on content in 2022.
There’s a lot in what you just said that I want to unpack, but I want to start with the idea of bingeing. And because you quote the showrunners, Robert and Michelle King, who ran “The Good Wife” for a number of years, about they feel that streaming and bingeing have distended shows eroding the narrative discipline of linear TV. Do you think that’s true? Do you think that this kind of open-ended bingeing culture has created flabby television?
I think it’s occasionally true. I mean, you often see shows where you think this episode is going on way too long, or this show is going on way too long, too many episodes. I mean, one of the virtues of bingeing was that on network TV, the rule of thumb was that even fans only watched one out of four episodes. So that meant every episode had to be what they call “closed.” In other words, each episode used to be an entire story, because otherwise, if a fan only watched one in four episodes, they wouldn’t know where they were.
You can drop into any episode of “Seinfeld” and it makes narrative sense.
Yeah. One of the effects of that was it meant that the characters were static and never changed. Any given character would be the same in the first episode or the first season as he or she would be in the fifth episode or the fifth season, they’d be the same character. Whereas bingeing where you could have a season-long arc over a whole season of 10, 15, 20 episodes say, and characters could change. It gave writers a lot more opportunity to exercise their trade, and so better writers flocked suddenly to the streamers that were reluctant to work on cable or certainly network. Then when you had better writers, you attracted better actors, and you also attracted showrunners. And often the difference between TV and movies was that writers became the showrunners, the directors of TV, whereas writers were sort of denigrated in movies, and you had a separate category of directors. Bingeing had a lot of ancillary effects that improved the whole TV experience.
Peak TV shows have all incredible character development, crackling dialogue, but visually, they’re not as interesting to me as some other things. And I’m wondering maybe that might be something where these writer-directors are more interested in character development and dialogue rather than creating a Terrence Malick-style vista or setting.
Well, I think that’s definitely true. There was a rumor, and I don’t know if this is true or not, that David Chase was so uninterested in the visuals that he would cut an episode just by listening to the dialogue without looking at it.
It does feel like the era of Peak TV kind of empowered writers in a way that feature films didn’t.
Definitely. I mean, directors became the, so-called auteurs in the seventies. Nobody, Scorsese, none of those directors wrote their scripts. And the great writers like Robert Towne rarely directed. You had a real chasm between writers and directors, which TV kind of reversed.
Let’s talk about money. One of the things that I was naively unaware of was just the vast sums of money that go into making television. There are a couple of things here that I’ve noted, $100 million on two seasons of “House of Cards,” $200 million on some series called “Marco Polo” that I’ve never even heard of. Netflix spent $17 billion on content in 2022.
I know. They were staggering for me when I first learned of them, and it’s getting to be more and more expensive. And I guess one could say it’s getting to be more and more expensive, partly because big tech, namely Amazon and Apple, have gotten into the streaming space, and for them, streaming is a hobby. It’s like stamp collecting. It’s not where they make their money. Amazon, which sells pots and pans, can put unlimited amounts of money into their streamers.
And all that money is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it makes it possible to raise production values, pay more for better actors, et cetera. On the other hand, when you put that kind of money into a series, you want to make your money back. And so it causes a lot of these showrunners to be risk-averse because they’re afraid to take risks, they’re afraid to fail, in which case they won’t get their money back and they’ll lose their deals.
You suggest in your book that particular gravy train is coming to the end of the tracks.
Yes, it is partly because, well, one of the elements was the two strikes, the writer’s strike and the actor’s strike and the settlements, which is costing the producers, the studios, the networks, and the streamers quite a bit of money, so they’re cutting back considerably on how much they have for production. Secondly, there’s so much more competition now so that a lot of the money is going into just more shows, not necessarily going into the quality of each series. So there are cutbacks, and plus there’s a lot of consolidation, and when you consolidate, you get debt. For example, the most blatant example of that is when AT&T bought Warner Brothers and HBO and then sold it to Discovery. And Discovery CEO David Zaslav took on $55 billion in debt. So they’ve got to pay that debt off, or at least make a big dent in it. And to do that, they have to cut back, which is what they’re doing.
And so not investing in these kind of marquee HBO properties of the past like “Game of Thrones” or such.
Fewer of those, yeah, I mean, they still go all out on some shows and spend insane amounts of money on them, but not as often, not as frequently as they used to.
Your book ends with the suggestion that we’re on the other side of Peak TV.
I started the book as a kind of tribute to Peak TV. Look at this, we’re living through this incredible golden age of TV and aren’t we lucky? But I took me about three years to write the book, and while I was writing it, the whole picture changed. A lot of the things that we’ve just been talking about happened. It turned out that the streaming model is not as profitable as people thought, so there’s just been a lot of cutbacks and recognition of that.
And you make the point that there are too many streamers making too many shows of questionable quality.
Right. I think that’s true. They all talk about making better shows, but throwing money at shows doesn’t necessarily guarantee quality, as several people pointed out. And Netflix as I also, I think I mentioned just turning around and making changes in Netflix, which pretty much contradict what was good about Netflix. So in some ways, we have the anti-Netflix now. No more bingeing, no more ad-free. There is an ad-free tier, but you have to pay twice as much money for the ad-free tier as the ad-supported tier.
You mentioned this idea of ads being introduced to cable, to streaming, and that you return kind of toward the end of your narrative to the beginning of the narrative where you describe television as, in Norman Minow’s words, “a vast wasteland.” And it’s basically because the sponsors have a lock over the spectrum where the content can go to which Oz, The Sopranos kind of break apart, but now the spectrum again with the ads you suggest will really narrow again.
One of the big problems with network TV was that sponsors and advertisers had too much power, and each network had a division called Standards and Practices, which essentially exercised self-censorship. And HBO and all the cable networks and so forth dispensed with sponsors because they used a subscriber-based model business model. And once you go back to sponsors like a network is doing, and a lot of the other streamers are doing as well, with ad-supported tiers, you’re introducing sponsors again, which is essentially what ruined network TV.
Not entirely, but I think largely because they just don’t want their products, their Buicks and their aspirin and whatever, their refrigerators. They don’t want them next to scenes of extreme sex and violence and controversy because they don’t want them associated with that. So you have to cut out what the sponsors demand. You cut out those scenes.
At one point, Puritanical behavior of codes that were imposed on the networks meant that, for example, married couples couldn’t sleep in the same bed. They had to sleep in twin beds next to each other. I mean, it was ridiculous. And hopefully that will not creep back into streaming. But I think that these ad-supported tiers, give it an opening, open a door for it.
It’s the disappearance, of anti-heroes, the disappearance of good, bad guys, the disappearance of discomfort viewing, which I think one of the interesting things about the golden age of cable and streaming was that there was a hunger in the audience for badness. In “Breaking Bad,” no matter how bad Vince Gilligan made Walter White behave, the fans wanted more, they wanted worse. There was a phrase for “The Sopranos,” “less yacking and more whacking,” which characterizes the hunger for badness among the audience.
In Michael Shulman’s review of your book in the New Yorker, he says, “The industry’s default setting is for crap.” Do you agree?
I don’t think that’s true anymore because of the rise of cable and streaming, but it definitely used to be during the high tide of network TV.
I instinctively agree with Shulman only because capitalism is our default setting, and isn’t that what Netflix, HBO, and these other corporations are going for, at the end of the day is return on investment? Therefore, the lowest common denominator is where everyone will end up eventually.
Well, exactly. It’s like what Disney CEO Bob Iger was talking about when he started the Disney+ streaming channel. I’m paraphrasing here: “I’m not worried about all these other streamers and other studios and whatever, because we have the content. Nobody else is going to make Marvel films and nobody else is going to make X, Y, and Z.” And he said, “Content is king.” But in fact, money is king. Cash is king. And that’s the depressing conclusion I reach at the end of the book. But it’s true. It’ll work its way to the bottom eventually, all this stuff. We’re lucky that we have decades of stuff to watch, and it’s a kind of a small miracle, but the long-term picture is kind of grim.
Do you think so? Or is it just that it’s cyclical?
Well, I take it back. You’re right. I think there’s cycles, and the short-term picture is grim. But eventually the cycle will turn and we’ll have another golden age of something or other. It’s hard to know what it’ll look like, but it’ll come.
