The Great Streaming Space-Time Warp Is Coming

To a TV critic — that is, someone who believes that television is the nervous system through which our culture sends signals to itself — this is all exciting and unnerving. On the one hand, there will be more of everything: more old TV, more new TV, more opportunities, at least theoretically, for representation and risk-taking.

On the other hand, big money can be risk-averse. The same economic forces that have turned the movie season into a battle of the franchises may drive streamers to focus on bringing us new versions of old things we’ve already proven we like: “Star Wars” and Marvel series on Disney Plus, DC Comics brand extensions on Warner’s HBO Max. If no content ever truly dies in the streaming era, it may also bring us the curse of eternal life: a few immortal megabrands keeping a lock on the culture at the expense of new voices and ideas.

It’s not as if giving the people what they want is a new concept in TV, of course. What’s changing is the means of giving it to them. On the one hand, massive corporations are tying their streaming platforms to their billion-dollar intellectual-property holdings; on the other, the granular viewer data available to streaming algorithms makes them more efficient at serving up good-enough versions of things you loved.

TV may be overrun, not by bad content, but by unexciting competence.

Even if you take the optimistic view, that artists will always find space somewhere to innovate, the discussion around their work will inevitably change. The same-time-next-week TV schedule made the “Did you see it last night?” conversation possible. But on streaming, where you can binge a show in a weekend or sample it over a month, it’s always last night somewhere.

Streaming could have the effect of making TV both more ubiquitous and more submerged in the culture. The show that “everyone” talks about on Monday morning will be replaced by shows that different sectors of the audience start humming about days or weeks after they’re released. (Even the Disney and Apple series that follow a weekly release schedule won’t be tied to particular time slots.)

This kind of experience is nothing new in other art forms, of course; it’s how we’re used to talking about books. But TV’s simultaneous audience of tens of millions, all seeing the same thing at the same time, was what made it a mass, communal phenomenon.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/arts/television/apple-tv-plus-disney-plus.html?emc=rss&partner=rss