I left Amazon Studios in 2017 (after accusations I dispute), and five years later, the larger industry picture looks exceedingly bleak. In the last year nearly every major studio, from Warner Bros. to Paramount, has announced layoffs and write-offs. The legacy broadcast business, which was for decades the industry’s bread and butter, now, in the Disney chief executive Bob Iger’s ominous phrase, “may not be core.” HBO, long the standard-bearer for TV excellence, had its name unceremoniously scrubbed when the streaming service HBO Max became simply Max. Streaming, that sexy business model that the entire industry fell for, is turning out to be very expensive and not nearly as much fun as was imagined. Disney+ has lost subscribers for two consecutive quarters. Amazon was plagued by reports that its big investment in a “Lord of the Rings” series yielded disappointing viewership numbers. Over it all, the specter of A.I. looms like a dementor at the window of a party. When people do get back to work, they’ll be looking for safe, surefire hits.
To truly understand prestige TV’s peril in context, though, you have to go back 30 years to the moment of its birth: “The Larry Sanders Show.” HBO rolled “Sanders” out in 1992 and it went on to earn 56 Emmy nominations over the next six years. It was not a hit by broadcast standards, but it was a show people in hip circles talked about. Many of its key writers and producers, including Judd Apatow and Steve Levitan, went on to broadly influence TV and film comedy. “Sanders” was a single-camera sitcom with no laugh track that featured knowing meta-dialogue and self-aware celebrity cameos. So real. So harsh. So funny.
Inspired by the critical praise it received, cable TV outlets — HBO, yes, but also Showtime and, later, FX — scaled up at the end of the ’90s to produce edgier shows like “The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City” and “Oz.” By airing on pay cable, these shows were freed from F.C.C. restrictions on language, sex and violence — and they made good use of that freedom. From the business side, the urban tastemakers who cared about shows like “Sanders” and “The Sopranos” were also the most likely to shell out extra for a subscription TV service. Thus, the prestige era was born. The slogan “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” summed it up: Prestige TV was trying to be, as was sometimes said, “filmovision” — as dark and true to life or shockingly violent as necessary. It was television with no limits.
When streamers started producing their own shows, they followed the same model. Netflix made a mark with “House of Cards,” “Orange Is the New Black” and “BoJack Horseman,” and at Amazon we launched “Transparent,” “Fleabag” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” The goal was attention and acclaim — and it worked. In 2015, “Transparent” was the first streaming show to win a best series award at the Golden Globes. By 2021, the streamers claimed the majority of outstanding comedy and outstanding drama Emmy nominations, with “Ted Lasso” (Apple TV+) and “The Crown” (Netflix) each winning. Yet none of these shows ever reached the huge audiences found by network hits like “The Big Bang Theory” or “Dancing With the Stars.”
Now the pendulum is swinging back toward shows with lower prestige but higher viewership. On Max, “Game of Thrones” and “Succession” share a home with “House Hunters” and “Dr. Pimple Popper.” While audiences still get the occasional edgy exception, like “The Bear” and “Squid Game,” there’s been a surge in conventional programming like tween shows and true crime.