Golden age of Television?

I would say it's a golden age for TV series. I am not sure that exactly means it is a golden age for television as a whole considering the golden age of TV News, depending on what metric you use, is probably not now. Same for the golden age of talk / variety / comedy shows.

EDIT: I should add that when we think top quality recent TV serie, we often think about a single long story split in episodes and not shot exclusively in studios (by opposition to soaps). There are certainly things like that that predates The Sopranos. Wiseguy comes to mind.

I would definitely say the golden age is now. We've reached a point where, in my opinion, the best TV shows out there are better than the best movies out there. A TV show can take time developing characters, an environment, and story arcs that a movie cannot. TV shows are even starting to attract A-list movie talent.

I also feel like TV now is way better than it ever has been before.

Even with the cutoff being 2010+ we've had:

Game of Thrones
Breaking Bad (later seasons)
Better Call Saul
Billions
Fargo
Mr. Robot
Peaky Blinders
House of Cards
Black Sails
Hannibal
Ray Donovan
Rick and Morty
Ash vs. Evil Dead
True Detective (S1)
Narcos

And some other shows that are good but not top tier (Bosch, Limitless, Lucifer, The Expanse, Luther, Black Mirror, etc)

I'd put that list up against any other decade easily. I don't feel like it was any one show specifically (Sopranos) that can take credit for the shift, rather, it was more just a natural evolution to better writing and more cohesive plots over an entire season instead of week-to-week adventures.

Alex_sl said:

TV shows are even starting to attract A-list movie talent.

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We have seen acting talents doing TV work, but also directing and writing talent. Though, when it comes to writing, it feels like, at some point in the last decade or so, writers became more interested by TV work than by movie work and as a result we have seen a lot more good writing in TV shows than in movies. Note that it is mostly an american situation. It's possibly getting there in the UK too, but in continental Europe there are not that many great TV shows (northern Europe gave us some) compared to great movies.

Certainly golden-age for me. The Shield, Six Feet Under and 30 Rock are among the best not mentioned yet

80's-90's because of Married With Children. This country is so PC now that they could never make another show like it.

You could say that with Seinfeld, Friends, Married With Children, Dream On, Growing Pains the golden age of sitcoms is behind us. What do we have now? Big Bang Theory and How I met your Mother?

I think being able to 'get away' with more on television has gotten us to this point. HBO, Netflix, Starz, AMC, FX, etc. have pushed the boundaries farther and farther, while AMC and FX continue to push what's allowed on basic cable. Movies have been at that same point for 50+ years, television is just finally able to do the same.

Szlia_sl said:

You could say that with Seinfeld, Friends, Married With Children, Dream On, Growing Pains the golden age of sitcoms is behind us. What do we have now? Big Bang Theory and How I met your Mother?

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south park and silicon valley?

I love older shows and shit like Farscape, BSG, TNG, Seinfeld etc is my jam but yeah there was a LOT of shit back then whereas it feels like there is just WAY too much good TV for even me, a retired dude with nothing better to do 24x7, to keep up with. I have something like 3TB of unwatched TV shows I wanna get to some day, and every year more good shows come on. It never really felt like that before 2010 I'd say, there were half a dozen really good shows and you could watch them all.

On the other hand there is zero doubt in my mind earlier decades were the golden age of movies, nowadays its 90% utter shit, sculpted to be as appealing to global audiences as possible with any complexity stripped. TV > movies by a million points right now.

Fadaar_sl said:

I think being able to 'get away' with more on television has gotten us to this point. HBO, Netflix, Starz, AMC, FX, etc. have pushed the boundaries farther and farther, while AMC and FX continue to push what's allowed on basic cable. Movies have been at that same point for 50+ years, television is just finally able to do the same.

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Heh, I can't believe what they were able to get away with on The Shield

For sure, it's the golden age. I believe it actually started with Oz; but it becamepopularizedby The Sopranos. I believe this all coincided with the DVR and then the ability to watch online/saved programs directly from your provider. The whole impetus for producing episodic, procedural shows before this time period was due to the rigid nature of TV scheduling; you couldn't count on someone being able to watch every episode, so each episode had to have its own story make sense. Sometimes that worked well, like Star Trek, but I don't think you can ever make a 'great' show like that--it often devolves into shlock, like Law and Order, where characters become flat and don't even develop. (And worse yet, logical consistency starts to really catch up to it; some problem they solve with X device in an earlier episode surfaces again and they forget about X device because it's not serialized.)

That said, of course there were serialized shows before DVR/Tivo era, and those were almost always huge too, everyone talked about them 24/7. Twin Peaks, or any number of Mini-Series (North and South, Shogun, Lonsome Dove ect). But the problem is, without that ability to watch anytime, serialized stuff had a pretty hard limit, I think, because you couldn't get 'into' multiple serialized showed at once and so, I'm guessing, most networks didn't even want to try. So shows had to be 'events' mostly in this format if they wanted some decent budgets.


But now that the restriction is gone? And I believe another big factor is how much more inexpensive CGI and effects have become, as well as general film tools (Digital film ect) I don't think its deniable how many great series have appeared; it's a combination of much more relaxed saturation point AND cheaper production costs per quality (Even if overall production prices have gone up, I doubt you could have produced GoT even with this money 20 years ago, the tech just was not there). In my opinion, due to these, TV has overtaken the movies as the medium I want to see stories told in; it's not surprising watching actors and major writing talent being drawn to TV now.

Justified.
Rome
Game of Thrones
Sopranos
Deadwood
Wire
Season 1 True Detective.
Mad Men
Breaking Bad
Better Call Saul
Fargo
Narcos
House of Cards
Battle Star Galactica
Downton Abbey
Black Sails (This one has gotten so good its shocking)
Homeland.
Six Feet Under
Vikings
The Knick
(More mid field, but still far better than most things from previous eras, except exceptional hits, and depending on taste are still entertaining as fuck)
Dexter
Spartacus
Sons of Anarchy
Last Kingdom
Shanara
Banshee

(Can list 10 more here, easy)


And then there are tons of great mini series, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Generation Kill. Plus tons of short series from Britain, Peaky Blinders and Luther. I mean there is seriously so much great TV it's hard to not admit this is by far the best era of TV for stories on TV. And while the range in that last goes from slightly campy/fun, to high drama? Almost all of them beat the pants off of episodic crap from before this era. Even the 'mid range' shows are often better than the old style serials which were very good.

Lithose: People had VCR before they got Tivo, but the point still has some merit. I don't remember taping a TV show episode.


Astro: How is South Park a sitcom though? Even if we remove the notion that it should be done with multi camera in front of a live audience, a core element is the limited number of main locations... is that really the case with South Park?

The biggest change is TV is no longer taboo for film actors/etc, so you can attract some pretty impressive acting talent

Szlia_sl said:

Lithose: People had VCR before they got Tivo, but the point still has some merit. I don't remember taping a TV show episode.

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Yeah, I had to tape shows for my parents hah. But the big difference there was two fold. First you could only tape one show, and the TV had to remain on that channel, and TVs were fairly expensive, many families only had one in the 80's. So if you had two competing serial TV shows? Even if you wanted to tape one and watch the other, it often wasn't possible (Taping was only really a method to allow you to watch it if you weren't physically in the house). Plus setting up a recording was a bitch, comparatively unless you had a human there to start it.

Meanwhile DVR was super easy, cheap by comparison (Tapes only held 3 shows), easy to set up and very early on it could record off channels. Once on demand or 'saved shows' began hitting the scene, or netflix style buffet shows/internet storage, is when you really started to see the explosion grow. I don't believe it is a one for one reason, but for sure I think it had a lot to do with it. (Combined with all the other technologies growing cheaper, and more available from computers to TV to internet. Even poor families an have 3+ TVs now. Digital formats allow easy transfer of shows, you can order up shows without even remembering to record them ect. It's not nearly as much of a risk anymore, I don't think, to make a show and fear people won't see it simply due to logistics--if your show is good, today, people can find a way to watch it.)

Cybsled_sl said:

The biggest change is TV is no longer taboo for film actors/etc, so you can attract some pretty impressive acting talent

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I think a big part of this, is as Szi said, the writing talent has been swarming onto TV. And a big reason for that, imo, is both the tools for viewership allowing more money to be invested in serial shows AND better tools for behind the camera which allows for much higher quality. As I said above, even with this same budget, in the 90's? I doubt a show like GoT could have been made at near the same quality. (And being in campy, bad TV could damage an actors career.)

I completely agree with the notion that TV* shows keep getting better while movies are generally getting worse.


There is so much good TV out in just the past year, 12 monkeys and the man in the high castle are two recent shows that I absolutely love. for me, the mid-tier shows like agents of shield, agent carter, dark matter, magicians, etc, etc, are all still highly enjoyable, and there are sooo many more.

these days even bad TV shows are more enjoyable for me simply because its so easy to fast forward past any shit scenes/characters that i don't want to watch.

I mean.. fucking Hardhome scene from game of thrones may have been the best action scene from any tv show I have ever watched. shit was just amazing.

Truly a great time for television.

elidib_sl said:

I also feel like TV now is way better than it ever has been before.

Even with the cutoff being 2010+ we've had:

Game of Thrones
Breaking Bad (later seasons)
Better Call Saul
Billions
Fargo
Mr. Robot
Peaky Blinders
House of Cards
Black Sails
Hannibal
Ray Donovan
Rick and Morty
Ash vs. Evil Dead
True Detective (S1)
Narcos

And some other shows that are good but not top tier (Bosch, Limitless, Lucifer, The Expanse,Luther, Black Mirror, etc)

I'd put that list up against any other decade easily. I don't feel like it was any one show specifically (Sopranos) that can take credit for the shift, rather, it was more just a natural evolution to better writing and more cohesive plots over an entire season instead of week-to-week adventures.

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You're crazy if you don't think Luther is top tier.