Television 2015: Too Much In Too Many Ways

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Ten or 15 years ago when "Survivor" dominated television, critics wrung their hands raw about the death of the scripted series. Reality TV was too cheap and too easy not to crowd out everything else. Well, it didn't work out that way. As NPR's pop-culture blogger Linda Holmes calculates, if you started on January 1, 2016 and caught up with one scripted 2015 primetime TV series per day, you could not finish by the end of the calendar year. Linda's here to talk more about it. Linda, is that true?

LINDA HOLMES, BYLINE: It is true. Those numbers actually came from the research people at FX Networks who sat down and counted up - they call them estimates, but they sat down and counted up all the scripted shows. Last year, it was 371, and that was for 2014. They calculated for 2015 - over 400 - over 400 scripted primetime shows.

CORNISH: Nice.

HOLMES: That's not reality. It's not news. It's not sports. It's not anything like that. That's just scripted primetime series.

CORNISH: And this comes when everyone has been talking about the golden age of television. And you say kind of the dirty secret of that is it's actually the golden age of nobody knowing what the Frosted Flakes is going on (laughter).

HOLMES: I did say that. I did say that. You know, it's so weird because there's this huge amount of television, but there are also so many different ways that people watch it now. I counted 25 different ways that you can watch just, like, a network or cable show. This doesn't even count Netflix.

CORNISH: And that included like streaming, using the DVR...

HOLMES: Streaming, using apps, using apps that the networks own, using apps that somebody else owns, using a set-top box, using whatever or, of course, the option of watching it for free with an antenna, which people still do. It's such a large amount of stuff, and there are so many different ways to take it in that everybody is really struggling to kind of get their arms around it.

CORNISH: So Linda, that's the struggle for us. What about the struggle for networks in terms of figuring out what shows are a success, understanding viewership? What's going on for them?

HOLMES: Well, this whole debate about whether there's too much television started with a quote from the CEO of FX Networks - his name is John Landgraf - who was speaking to a room full of TV critics and said, this is too much television. And that was a quote that kind of got people really talking about whether or not that was the case. I think his argument would be when you make really great shows, which he absolutely believes they do, it's harder to get them noticed because there are so many good shows. That was his - kind of his take on it, was, the good shows are so numerous that they keep people from finding the really great shows.

The flipside of that that critics have been kind of exploring since then is that when you have a lot more shows, you have a much more diverse collection of people creating them, people appearing in them, people working for them as writers who might later create shows. So you do get a better mix of voices. And also, you get those weird little shows that people say, you know, who knows whether something like "Mr. Robot," which is on USA this summer, would have existed if you had a smaller kind of more streamlined space. Would you get these odd-ball experimental shows that people often really love?

CORNISH: In the end, do you feel this too-much-TV blessing, curse - what's your verdict?

HOLMES: I think ultimately, blessing, unless you happen to be a legacy network that feels like it's really hard to get attention for your shows. It can be tough. But I think for me as a viewer and a critic, ultimately, I come down on the side of it being a good thing.

CORNISH: And if you want to join the conversation or talk to Linda about the good shows that you think should be considered great shows, you can go onto our website and check out the whole essay series on TV. And, Linda, where can they find that?

HOLMES: That is at npr.org/tv2015.

CORNISH: That's Linda Holmes, NPR's pop-culture blogger. Linda, thanks so much for coming in.

HOLMES: Thank you, Audie. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.