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Is The Sopranos creator David Chase right that quality TV is 'dying'?

Recently, Chase stirred conversation with his doomy remarks about the industry. We explain the basis for his comments – and other showrunners weigh in on whether it is truly in crisis.

Every day for four years, Sam Esmail went to work, awaiting a phone call that never came. It was the mid 2010s, and Mr Robot – the New Jersey-born filmmaker's Emmy award-winning debut TV show, about a vigilante hacker who s an underground movement of cyber anarchists – was experimenting with stranger and stranger storylines. Riskier and riskier shot compositions. Bolder and bolder anti-capitalist ideas.

"I  thinking: Uhh, someone's going to call us at some point and tell us to knock it off, right?" he laughs. The experiments that Mr Robot was allowed to carry out on-screen "made me realise that TV was in a new place. But even then, you couldn't help but feel that it was all going to end soon. That they'd been letting the lunatics run the asylum, and that can't last".

In 2024, that end might finally be nigh. Last year saw a massive 14% decrease in original scripted shows broadcast on American television, with fewer new shows greenlit and plenty of existing ones cancelled. And last year, as some of the most critically revered small-screen sagas of the last decade, from Succession to Barry, came to their conclusions, fans were left to wonder what ambitious dramas might take their place at the top of the TV totem pole. Sure, shows like The Bear, Severance and The White Lotus continue to win ratings and applause. But they're increasingly coming to look like anomalies in a TV industry pulling back from commissioning complex stories in the vein of past golden age TV hits like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

The Sopranos was the first television show that didn't feel like it was intentionally trying to tread water – Sam Esmail

All of which prompted the man credited with spearheading the last quarter century of prestige TV dramas, The Sopranos creator David Chase, to declare that "something is dying" in an interview marking 25 years since the show first hit the air. "This is the 25th anniversary, so of course it's a celebration," the 78-year-old told the Times. "But perhaps we shouldn't look at it like that. Maybe we should look at it like a funeral." Chase's words reverberated around the industry – with Esmail among those nodding along with that bleak outlook. "I'm hoping I'm wrong but I do agree with David that this golden age of television seems to be sunsetting," he tells the BBC.

"There's definitely been a contraction after years of it feeling like TV was undergoing this crazy expansion," adds Sam Boyd, creator of HBO romantic drama Love Life – a show that, he says "happened in the boom times, where a new streaming service was basically being announced every week, and they needed content. It felt like the gold rush. But I don't think if I wrote the pilot now that I'd be able to make the show." Boyd describes a climate of aggressive cost-cutting – and he would know. In 2022, Love Life was one of hundreds of titles that weren't just cancelled by HBO owners Warner Bros Discovery, but pulled from their streaming services entirely, in a move that some have alleged was in part to avoid having to pay residuals (payments based on viewing figures) to their cast, crew and writers.

Why is all this happening? At first glance, you'd be forgiven for thinking TV execs are attempting to steady the ship after one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the industry. After Covid-19 caused productions to shut down in 2020 for months, costing the industry millions, 2023 saw writers and actors down tools in strike action that lasted much of the year. Look a little closer, though, and the industry was already experiencing troubles before those costly interruptions.

Television's prestige era, experts widely agree, began with The Sopranos. "It was the first television show that didn't feel like it was intentionally trying to tread water," says Esmail, with a nod to how the show surprised audiences with storylines and characters that evolved over years, rather than resetting at the end of every episode (a novelty back in 1999). "That was my biggest beef with TV prior to The Sopranos. I didn't really watch television because of its repetitive nature. With a lot of shows, it was a repeat every week of the same characters in a different situation. But with The Sopranos, there was a sophistication to its construction across a number of seasons. You felt like you were on a long-form journey. It always felt like it was building towards something."

The Sopranos inspired others like it – The Wire, The Leftovers, Boardwalk Empire, the list goes on – and began to help centre TV as the go-to place for storytelling that’d delve deep into a character's psychology. Audiences gravitated en masse to these shows and the complicated, often unlikeable, sometimes morally reprehensible anti-heroes they revolved around. The boundaries of what a TV show could be began to expand. Series like Lost emerged, full of head-trip narratives and cinematic flourishes.

The likes of Deadwood followed in The Sopranos' sweary, bloody wake, with violence and profanity unlike much of what we'd seen on the small screen before. During this time, internet forums and the rise of social media helped cultivate fandoms around these shows that sparked a sea change in the way TV was being consumed. For decades, movies had been where the zeitgeist lay. Now the small-screen was where our most probing and ambitious stories were being told – and among those sitting up and paying attention to this was a tech industry making bold new leaps with video streaming technology.

By the early 2010s, streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video were beginning to provide new life to existing ambitious prestige TV shows. Even more intriguingly, they were also beginning to program ambitious content of their own. Rather than copy what was on traditional television, they put bold new ideas in place to convince audiences who liked shows like The Sopranos that streaming was where the really groundbreaking tales were being told. Among Netflix's first original hits were the absurdly inventive sci-fi The OA and genre-bending animation BoJack Horseman.

Shows like Breaking Bad – first broadcast exclusively on the AMC cable channel but acquired by Netflix after its fourth season – found whole new audiences on services that encouraged viewers to jump straight into the next episode each time the credits rolled, rather than having to wait a week, as had been the case with traditional TV.

The streamers are like any of these tech companies, in that they disrupt an entire industry then become the thing that already existed – Sam Boyd

"Netflix kinda broke the concept of what TV was with the binge model, releasing an entire season at once so you could watch it all at your own leisure," says Esmail, who points out that this model "begged for a [more] serialised nature of storytelling" – that is, with complex overarching storylines carrying over from previous episodes and even previous seasons. In previous decades, TV showrunners had to work around the fact that audiences would often miss episodes and therefore vital plot twists and turns; prior to streaming, if viewers missed an episode of a show, they might find it difficult to catch-up.

"Netflix's binge model, however, allowed you as a storyteller to do something different," continues Email. "It really broke open the dam in  of serialised storytelling and changed the way people consumed TV." Following The Sopranos, complex serialised dramas did emerge but the linear channels were ill-designed for them – but now platforms were finally emerging that seemed tailor made for their, and viewers', needs.

Esmail's Mr Robot – a show first broadcast on the tiny USA Network but which found a huge international audience on Amazon Prime Video – wasn't the only series to benefit from that dam-busting. Were Stranger Things made in the '90s, it might have followed a Monster Of The Week format, pitting Eleven and co against a new threat in each episode then essentially resetting when the credits roll. Instead, its  fifth season looks set to answer mysteries seeded in its first season, after years of slow-building intricacy.

One problem soon emerged though. The tech companies that had taken over Hollywood were used to technology-industry profits, akin to a new smartphone launch – Apple generated $383.2 billion revenue in 2023, 52% of which came from iPhone sales. However, after spending billions on content to corner the market – in 2022, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and others spent a combined $23 billion on original shows and movies – "the economics weren't working out the way they'd thought," as Esmail puts it. The model of getting subscribers to pay a monthly fee for an infinite sea of content wasn’t generating the hoped-for revenue. In the race to outdo each other, rival streaming services "grossly overspent" according to a recent Variety report; that strategy of churning out as much content as possible to lure new subscribers "has long since been exposed as a fallacy, with the streaming wars now effectively concluded in defeat for all but Netflix," the publication's media analyst Tyler Aquilina noted.

Even for the streaming wars' supposed winners, victory has not proved glorious. In 2022, Netflix found its stock price plummeting as almost 1m subscribers cancelled their s. Since then, with other services also struggling to balance out their extraordinary expenditure on shows, brutal cost-cutting has begun with expensive dramas curtailed in favour of cheaper-to-produce reality hits like dating show Love Is Blind and real estate soap opera Selling Sunset. Netflix reportedly sought to save $300m in 2023 by pivoting to cheaper content and cracking down on s sharing s with their family and friends.

The audience is so fractured right now and made up of all these little niches. Unless you permeate the culture like a Succession or a White Lotus or The Bear,  most people don’t know you exist – Sam Boyd

Another money-making measure set out recently has seen Netflix and Amazon Prime Video rolling out adverts before and during content, in the style of traditional linear TV. After all the disruption and financial cuts – the average weekly pay of working screenwriters has declined by 23% according to a WGA study – this is an indicator to Boyd that the industry is back to where it was 20 years ago, with streaming platforms relying on a glut of reality TV shows and safe programmes, bolstered by advertising, that no longer champion the creative freedom that them in the first place. "We're seeing more and more now that these companies have realised, 'Oh, the television industry was actually a pretty good business'. It's like, great work guys – you've just re-invented TV."

There are other challenges contributing to the decline in prestige TV series. Last year, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, actor-director-producer Justine Bateman, a prominent figure in the actors' and writers' strikes, alleged that showrunners were being asked by streaming platforms to factor in the fact that a huge proportion of viewers will be experiencing the show in a mode referred to as "second screen" – in other words, on in the background while they scroll other devices. "The viewer's primary screen is their phone and the laptop and they don't want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen," she explained to The Hollywood Reporter, describing how the behaviour forces showrunners into making a sort of "visual muzak… [streamers and studios] don't want anything on your show to distract [viewers] from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off."

"When that becomes the demand, you're not going to get complex antiheroes and super serialised storylines where you really have to follow all these details to understand it," says Esmail. "You can forget about something as abstract as Twin Peaks: The Return [working with phone-distracted audiences] – that's just not going to happen. As a filmmaker, you want every frame and every second of your TV show to be incredibly considered and crafted. But if people are just going to watch it while on their iPhone, well – as storytellers, to write for an audience like that, it's almost impossible."

Another obstacle is the sheer number of platforms available, and the fact that many people can’t afford subscriptions to all of them. Subscribing to Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock, Max, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV would cost $63.93 a month on the cheapest available plans. With people picking and choosing the platforms they subscribe to, it’s harder than ever for a TV show to become a phenomenon. "The audience is so fractured right now and made up of all these little niches," says Boyd. "Unless you permeate the culture like a Succession or a White Lotus or The Bear, you become this niche thing that some people know about but most don’t know exists."

He's not kidding. The last six months has seen the release of two incredibly groundbreaking TV series starring two of the biggest acting talents of their generations: Emma Stone (The Curse on Paramount) and Nicole Kidman (Prime Video's Expats). Despite being – in this writer's opinion – two of the best shows of modern times (The Curse in particular), few people seem to have heard of them, let alone watched them.

Despite the doom and gloom, there are reasons to be hopeful. For starters, there's a more diverse pool of talent waiting to tell their stories, should the industry give them the opportunity. Shows like True Detective: Night Country and Netflix sleeper hit Beef, both created by talented writers of colour, shows that TV has grown beyond stories about Difficult Men, created by white showrunners – a huge focus for the small screen in the early days of golden age TV drama.

It's all cyclical. It'll take a TV show like The Sopranos or The Wire or Breaking Bad or even True Detective that excites the masses and swings the pendulum back this way – Sam Esmail

There are also now parameters in place for a healthier, more creative TV industry following last year's industrial action. The strikes that rocked the industry in 2023 saw writers and actors win well-deserved protections from studio cost-cutting, which in theory will lead to creators making better content. After all, it's easier to write a great TV show when healthy and fairly remunerated for your work, instead of living in your car, fretting about medical insurance. Alex O'Keefe, writer of The Bear – one of the most successful shows of the last five years – couldn't afford his electricity bills.

Esmail is optimistic that TV will continue to have an important place in our culture because "it's all cyclical. It'll take a TV show like The Sopranos or The Wire or Breaking Bad or even True Detective that excites the masses and swings it back this way. But I don't think this is definite. I'll be here, waiting for that pendulum to swing back," smiles the filmmaker, who’s persevering with TV despite its troubles; among Esmail's  projects is an executive producer role on a reboot of Battlestar Galactica.

Boyd also remains committed to the format, because of his faith in the inherent pleasures of TV – how it allows us to get to know characters more intimately than film because of the sheer amount of time we're permitted to spend with them, and more viscerally than with literary fiction, because we're seeing their world. "TV really is about hanging out with characters who come to feel like your friends. You know what I mean? My wife falls asleep to Sex in the City every night. I watch The Sopranos all the time because I love hanging out with Paulie Walnuts. I really do think TV will endure, because they want to be around these characters they've had time to get to know so well and watch evolve."

To put it in language that fans of The Sopranos might appreciate – there may be a hit out on TV, but like the most hardened mobster, it's determined to survive. The lunatics aren't done running the asylum yet.

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