Despite the rise of streaming services and changing viewing habits, many believe the past decade has been a golden age for TV, with high-quality scripted series like “Game of Thrones” and “Stranger Things” gaining huge attention and acclaim. Established Hollywood stars now seek TV roles, a significant shift from the past. The number of original scripted TV series in the U.S. soared from 216 in 2010 to 600 in 2022, marking “peak TV.” However, due to the Hollywood writers’ strike and a shift towards profitability, the number of shows dropped to 516 last year, suggesting this golden era might be fading.
Many would contend that the past ten years have been the golden era of TV, even if the “traditional” TV model—that is, live TV, broadcast, and cable—has been severely impacted by streaming services and shifting media consumption habits in recent years.
That is, the heyday of written television when shows have received more attention, praise, and critical acclaim than they have ever had.
It would have been difficult to locate a well-known, successful Hollywood actor more than ten years ago who was willing to take on a significant part in a television series.
TV actor was a pejorative nickname for people who had not succeeded in making a lasting impression on the big screen.
Complex shows like Netflix’s “Stranger Things” and HBO’s “Game of Thrones” likely garner more attention these days than the majority of Hollywood blockbusters, and TV acting has not only lost its stigma but also grown to be a prominent career that many Hollywood stars want to.
The past ten years have seen a sharp growth in the creation of original scripted TV programming due to the growing popularity of TV drama, consumers’ apparently never-ending appetite for new shows and movies, and the arrival of well-funded streaming-only companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple.
As reported by Statista’s Felkix Richter, FX Networks Research projects that the number of original scripted TV series (excluding reruns) that broadcast in the US increased from 216 in 2010 to 600 by 2022, a time frame that is now commonly referred to as “peak TV”.
The number of TV shows fell by 14% to 516 last year, partly as a result of the Hollywood writers’ strike and partly as a result of a shift in emphasis from growth at all costs to profitability.
A prominent figure in the TV industry, FX chairman John Landgraf, foresaw this trend in 2022, declaring that the year will be “the peak of the peak TV era”—even before the writers’ strike severely hampered production in much of 2023.
“I don’t see new major purveyors of programming entering the scene as they have been continuously over the past decade or more,” Landgraf explained in August 2022. “And in fact, there are some prior purveyors of television programming that are kind of exiting the scenes. So, in other words, you’re at the point now where you’re not really adding new suppliers, but you are, to some extent, subtracting suppliers.”
Last month, GreatGameInternational reported that in a landmark case, five individuals were convicted in Las Vegas for operating Jetflicks, the largest illegal streaming service in America, which offered over 183,000 stolen TV episodes and generated millions in revenue, exceeding Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Prime Video combined.
