The Great Race to Rule Streaming TV

One big question is what all this means for us, at home, fishing in the cushions for our remotes: If even a network as seemingly sacred as HBO can be pressured by corporate bosses to crank out more shows in order to better compete with smartphones, what new era are we entering?

I asked Weidenfeld if he could really see HBO experimenting with a game show anytime soon. He was emphatic — “Yes, 100 percent. They have to” — then thought for a moment. “They might not call it HBO. It might all go under this WarnerMedia O.T.T.” — an abbreviation for over the top, which is industry-speak denoting a stand-alone streaming service — “where you can have HBO still be premium. But yes, if you’re paying $10.99 a month for it, they have to have volume.”

All of our screens are now TVs, and there is more TV to watch on them than ever. More dramas, more comedies, more thrillers, more fantasy-adventure series, more dating shows, more game shows, more cooking shows, more travel shows, more talk shows, more raunchy comedies, more experimental comedies, more family comedies, more comedy specials, more children’s cartoons, more adult cartoons, more limited series, more documentary series, more prestige dramas, more young-adult dramas, more prestige young-adult dramas — more, more, more.

In the golden age of what’s now called linear television — when viewing patterns were more predictable and, DVRs notwithstanding, more controllable — people had to watch what they wanted to watch when networks wanted them to watch it. But the advent of digital platforms streaming video on demand (S.V.O.D.s, in trade lingo) has broken the 24-hour day into infinite possibilities. Questions once crucial have been made irrelevant: “Does this show deserve a prime-time spot?” “Would this make a good lead-in to that?” The success of a given streaming show isn’t determined by how many people watch it but by how many subscriptions it helps to generate or maintain. The programming goal of an S.V.O.D., then, is an overall atmosphere of plenitude, a constantly updating slate of would-be “tentpole shows,” buttressed with enough theoretically watchable other stuff that viewers don’t flee once “Stranger Things” is over. As one producer put it to me, the mission at a streaming service like Netflix is “to basically create channel surfing within Netflix” — to entice us into a walled garden where the plantings are so copious we never think of leaving.

If you were to argue that this hyperabundance is, on balance, more of a good thing than bad, you could point to an underlying economic truth of streaming-era TV: It puts less pressure on an idiosyncratic or otherwise “challenging” series, because the viewership numbers needed to justify a show’s existence are lower than ever. Precisely how low is hard to say — streamers like Netflix self-report their ratings in the very rare instances when they disclose them at all — but certainly much lower than was historically true in the broadcast-TV era, when prime-time real estate was scarce. And lower too, perhaps, than was historically true even at HBO, where a series as critically enshrined as “The Wire” teetered on the edge of oblivion throughout its five-season run, canceled, uncanceled and threatened with cancellation again, according to the show’s creator, David Simon, in the face of a consistently meager audience.

In the streaming era, “you don’t have to pull in a massive audience” to justify a show, says Ravi Nandan, who directs the television efforts of the boutique studio A24 — known for its dedication to moderately budgeted, auteur-driven material like the Oscar-winning film “Moonlight.” Nandan brought up an appealingly bizarre A24 series from 2017 called “Comrade Detective.” A mock Cold War thriller, it was set in the 1980s, shot in Romania for peanuts with local talent and featured the voice acting — dubbed with intentional ungainliness — of Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. “For us it was, ‘This is a fun experiment,’ ” Nandan said. “Who knows what the outcome’s gonna be, but we’re in a time when we can take this chance, so why don’t we do it?” That hunch proved true when Amazon bought the show.