The Best TV shows of the Internet Age!

[Rock8man]

Here was an interesting article about this. I actually read it from beginning to end despite it being over-long and not getting to the point soon enough. But over it’s length it made a good case that so many classics of the past were watched over and over, but now during this TV golden age, there are so many good shows, why would you watch a show over when there’s no time and you move onto the next great show?

http://www.weeklystandard.com/overload-will-any-shows-from-the-golden-age-of-tv-endure/article/2011954

I also liked this bit about where the Golden age started and ended:

If you had told people 20 years ago that there would one day be too much TV worth watching, they would’ve either laughed or assumed you were some sort of dullard. But The Sopranos would debut in January 1999. HBO’s hit series combined sex and violence with Shakespearean power struggles and relatable family drama, inaugurating the medium’s age of the antihero, one in which upticks in sex and violence were accompanied by more complex and ambitious storytelling and sky-high production values. Many critics use that date to mark the beginning of the recent golden age of television, and it’s a sensible-enough starting point. But Landgraf’s decision to use 2002 as the point of comparison may make more sense. After all, HBO had been churning out original programming for decades—stand-up specials and sports programs and nudity-filled reality shows like Real Sex; mediocre sitcoms like Arli$$ and critically acclaimed ones like The Larry Sanders Show; lurid, pulpier fare like Oz—before David Chase’s gangster opus premiered. The Sopranos may have been the apotheosis of the network’s motto, “It’s not TV, it’s HBO,” but it wasn’t a revolution in and of itself.

It was FX’s show The Shield, which debuted in 2002, that truly altered the landscape. As Alan Sepinwall has pointed out, in its early years FX was mostly a dumping ground for syndicated programming: “If you wanted to watch MAS*H at 3 in the afternoon, or revisit the early days of NYPD Blue and The X-Files, FX was the place to go.” It wasn’t until The Shield came along—testing the boundaries of basic cable’s standards-and-practices units with near-nudity, heightened levels of violence, and raunchier-than-network language while capitalizing on the fact that, unlike HBO or Showtime, it was available for no extra charge—that the true explosion in TV occurred. After FX paved the way with The Shield, Rescue Me, and Nip/Tuck, AMC got into the game with Mad Men and Breaking Bad. And just like that, we were off to the races. If you want to know why the History Channel is currently airing a risqué show about Viking warriors, The Shield is as good a place as any to start.

But where to stop? It seems clear that the new golden age is over—the hit-to-miss ratio is simply too low now—but when did it end? Arguably 2013 is a good place to draw the curtain; as FX and basic cable were to 2002, so are Netflix and streaming to 2013

The flood of television programming from Netflix et al. since 2013, and the shotgun-blast manner in which new seasons are released, have combined to make it virtually impossible to keep up with everything worth watching. As recently as 15 years ago, a discerning TV watcher only needed to keep tabs on a handful of shows—a Sunday-night drama from HBO or AMC or Showtime; a Tuesday-night drama and a Thursday-night comedy from FX or maybe a broadcast network. But now it feels like there are nigh on infinite offerings from a nearly limitless number of channels. With thousands of hours of new TV coming out every year and an increasingly fractured marketplace demanding customers keep track of several different streaming services, how do we keep the truly excellent programming from being lost in the flood of mediocrity?

[Ginger_Yellow]

Seems bizarre to me to use the onset of streaming originals to mark the end of the golden age, given the premise of the article is the plethora of shows currently airing that are good to great. But I guess it makes sense to distinguish between linear and non-linear to some extent - maybe golden age vs silver age. I’ve talked here before about how weird it is that critics seem to ignore or at least under-cover streaming content, relatively to traditionally distributed film and TV. That’s changing, I think, and it was always less true on the TV side than on the movie side. It’s still the case, though, when it comes to Netflix’s overseas originals. Outside of Dark, I’ve not seen much critical coverage of the huge amount of foreign language content that Netflix finances and distributes internationally. Some of it is really, really good, and it’s going to undeservedly fall through the cracks outside the home countries, I suspect.

I do agree with this:

The sheer volume of new shows—the thousands of hours of new stuff—and the new distribution models make it difficult for older shows to stay in circulation and for excellent new shows to impress themselves upon the national consciousness. Why would I watch an episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Netflix’s hilarious sitcom, more than once when I have 10 hours of The Handmaid’s Tale to catch up on? Aren’t I just wasting my time if I flip on TBS and zonk out to 25-year-old Seinfeld episodes? What would possibly be the point of watching a random episode of ER or Hill Street Blues or Miami Vice?

It’s extremely rare that I rewatch TV these days. The Wire is the only one I can think of in the last year. I’m certainly not watching reruns on linear TV.

[wumpus]

@wumpus

going for Murder One next based on the critical rankin

Yeahhhh that kinda sucked. Gave up on that one. Going for In Treatment next based on the ranking. All the low hanging fruit (top 10 type stuff) is gone.

[wumpus]

In Treatment is… interesting. There are FORTY TWO episodes in the first season.

At first it feels kinda dull, almost like a podcast since it’s basically two (or three) people in a room talking the whole time, beacause it’s y’know … a show about therapy. Based on this Israeli show?

BeTipul

But you do get a legitimate sense of knowing these people as you ghostwatch their sessions over a series of weeks; being in it for the long haul is kinda the point of the series – you can only know people when you put the time in, and incur the significant emotional labor necessary to know them.

[abidingdude]

I loved In Treatment when it came out. Not sure how well it still holds up though, or if it’s worth rewatching knowing how each story ends.