Prestige Fatigue: Is Prestige TV an Oxymoron?

Hi! Been a while, folks. 

DISCLAIMER: I’d like to preface this essay by saying I love prestige TV as much as the next guy. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that, unless the next guy in question is David Chase himself, I love prestige TV more than the next guy. This critique, like any critique worth its salt, is made with love and passion for an industry I both admire and hope to impact one day. 

Speaking of David Chase, the celebrated creator of The Sopranos, a show credited as being one of the first true prestige TV series, thinks TV’s golden age has met its end. In a recent Times article, Chase argues that today’s television executives are too risk-averse to make a true high-brow TV drama. It is a vicious cycle whereby audience attention spans, so he believes, are too short to digest anything that “makes too much sense”, so streaming executives have reverted to a Pre-Sopranos TV climate where only safe bets were made on popcorn fodder shows. Is this a boomer-laden take on a nuanced challenge facing the television landscape? Yes. Do I agree with some of it? Also yes. 

However, if you’ll allow me to don my devil’s advocate cap, I’ll suggest that this isn’t entirely a bad thing. We know pop culture is cyclical and, with more factors at play than ever before — hello, Sally’s show getting cancelled because of the ALGORITHM — media trends are unpredictable at best. Twenty-five years is a long run for prestige television. Since The Sopranos, every network, streamer, and nepo-baby has tried their hand at a prestige series. Now I wonder, will television scholars look back on this quarter-of-a-century era and see it bookended by Sopranos and Succession? Is this truly the end of prestige TV? Unlikely.

Realistically, I believe this could be a shift in the equilibrium, evening out the television landscape to repopularize more traditional formats of scripted TV. Netflix has just entered the procedural game with the recently greenlit ER series Pulse and, anecdotally, everyone I know seems to be binging Law & Order, which is a good omen for Law & Order Toronto.

When you’re a TV aficionado, deeply entrenched in the golden age of television, it’s hard to remember that traditional television programming still very much exists. The most-watched scripted telecasts of 2023 are NCIS, Blue Bloods, FBI, Chicago Fire, and Young Sheldon. While the golden age of television has been thriving and broadcast and cable TV account for only 50% of viewership, the average linear consumer is probably watching a sitcom, a procedural, or a soap opera. If it ain’t broke…

In a Vulture article critiquing the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the streaming model, a Hollywood agent highlights the discrepancy between the tastes of TV executives and the tastes of the average consumer — “It’s hard to develop hit sitcoms when the people selling, pitching, buying, and programming them don’t seem to like them. They don’t seem to like what the audience likes.”

Prestige series like The Wire, Sherlock, The West Wing, Fleabag (yadda yadda yadda..) broke a mould that was ripe for the breaking. But not everything can be peak TV (the Wikipedia list seems a little generous, no?), the genre is simply too oversaturated. 

At its core, television is for the masses. Domesticity is inherent to the medium so, just like we need a popcorn-blockbuster-Marvel flick every once in a while, we also need a comfy sitcom to cleanse the palate after a long day at work.

Was television ever meant to be high-brow? Peak TV has afforded a wealth of opportunities to TV auteurs looking to indulge in narrative epics and character studies on a scope that other forms of visual media cannot accommodate. However, those comfortable, bite-sized, and episodic shows are equally essential. You can say that prestige TV is antithetical to the essence of the television, that it alienates the average viewer, sure, but everything is best in moderation. 

Could the “end” of prestige television restore balance to the TV marketplace? Are procedurals the new dramas? And can they hold up on streaming platforms?