’Tis the season of eulogies for television, deferred. The January 2024 Emmy Awards, delayed for more than four months by overlapping Hollywood industry strikes by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors’ Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), inspired a proliferation of laments for the end of the era of what has come to be known in the United States as “peak TV.” The narrative ending announced and described by popular cultural commentators, including the New York Times's John Koblin and New York Magazine's Josef Adalian and Lane Brown, goes something like this: In the years stretching from 2010 to 2022, the number of television series greenlit annually by an ever-proliferating number of streaming services rose consistently, culminating in 2022 with a total of 599. In the year since, driven by the same economic concerns both expressed and in part animated by the screenwriters’ and actors’ strikes, the number of television dramas submitted for Emmy consideration by networks and streaming services dropped by 5 percent, with limited series and comedy submissions declining even more radically by 16 and 19 percent, respectively (Koblin 2024).
The economic exigencies driving the widespread decisions to radically reduce the amount of original content produced by streaming services are part-and-parcel of a more foundational economic miscalculation. As Adalian and Brown (2023) would have it, the “binge-purge” phenomenon was the consequence of the collapse of a broader economic illusion, one in which both established and emergent streaming services came to conceive of themselves as players in the broader hi-tech industry. According to this economic vision, the value of a given company is driven less by profit it generates as increasing numbers of subscribers are drawn in by proliferating content, and more by the impression such proliferating—and theatrically high-brow—content makes on the investors driving the given streaming service's stock value. The question of whether investing in ever-greater numbers of series anchored by ever-greater numbers of stars honing their craft in dazzling sets with ever-more expensive production values would actually lead more people to subscribe to a given streaming service—such that the increased subscriber revenue would offset the increased production costs—was not the question to be asked, much less answered. Sometimes losing money is a necessary step on the route to imagining new horizons, the sorts of new horizons that Wall Street investors can't look away from, until they can, and do. And then the looking that matters is, once again, the looking of the family scattered across the sofa at home on a given Wednesday night, debating among themselves as the credits roll whether to watch a fourth episode of Ryan Murphy's latest melodrama—yes, they had agreed earlier they would stop at three, but who can stop, really?—or to call it a night.
But if the economic narrative of the rise and fall of “peak TV” is a story best told after the fact, there is another story, the story of the ongoing mutation of the forms of television narratives in response to shifting systems of delivery, distribution, and consumption, whose beginnings and ends are less clear. Though hardly independent of economic exigencies, such formal accounts draw from a much longer, largely literary, durée of serialization, translation, and audience engagement. It is this formal history, carried and registered in the mutable history of genres, that we seek to investigate in this special issue of Poetics Today.
The following are some of the questions posed—and engaged—by our contributors: In what ways does the current structure of television serialization resemble or depart from more historically distant modes of seriality? While the weekly model of network commercial television is the most immediate point of comparison, more historically distant examples of serial publication, like the nineteenth-century novel, offer potentially illuminating options. To what degree and in what ways is the materiality of the relevant media constitutive of the differences among the forms of seriality? In what ways does streaming change the ways in which television narratives respond to and engage with evolving-in-real-time, immediate events?
This issue's contributors are also interested in the ways in which TV storytelling changes in its dynamic relation with shifting large-scale economic practices and realities. How do the erosion of the workweek, the rise of the gig economy, and the processes of deindustrialization and global financialization work their way into not just the plots but also the very temporal and spatial predicates of serial narratives? What kind of commentaries do serials offer in relation to the economic upheavals of the past twenty years, and to their own medium's relation to them?
Another set of questions considers what kinds of narrative strategies developed to respond to an increasingly international set of audiences. While conventional wisdom has it that movie writers and producers have responded to this internationalization by focusing on the sort of films whose reach is predicated on limited language and “placeless” settings—comic and superhero films are the most obvious examples—this sort of universalizing is not the only approach. In what way does streaming enable the creation of multiple niche audiences? To what degree do such markets follow national and linguistic boundaries? What sorts of narrative forms and/or modes translate successfully across cultures? To what degree (and in what ways) does the internationalization of the market operate to reinforce preexisting conceptions of national cultures and in what ways does it complicate those conceptions? Does the creation of different national adaptations of already-existing shows speak to the power of an international audience or its limits?
In his book The Haunted Stage, Marvin Carlson makes the case that actors’ past roles “ghost” viewers experiences of the acting they do at any given moment—that is, that those roles shape viewers’ perceptions and experiences of a present performance. How does the archive created by streaming—the possibility that viewers have of watching and rewatching films and other shows on demand—change the ways in which casting can function? In what way are actors’ past roles invoked in present narratives? In what way do those casting choices enable the possibility of intertextual narrative interplay, in which plots involving actors’ past roles are made relevant to those actors’ present narratives?
The issue opens with Michael Szalay's analysis of the complex timeframes of Better Call Saul. Szalay makes the case that the series’ repeated shuttling back and forth between two temporal frames—the already-completed framework of the represented action and the moment of audience reception—should be understood both as an effort to synthesize the distinct forms of film and televisual narratives and as an expression of the exhausting endlessness of the “going-nowhere” career characteristic of postindustrial capitalism.
Martin Hipsky is similarly concerned with how economic structures have worked their way into the very shapes of TV storytelling. He turns to HBO's epic Succession as his case study and compares it with Anthony Trollope's realist masterpiece The Way We Live Now (1875) to demonstrate that recent TV serials share the capability of classic novels to seismographically register collective “doubts, forebodings, misgivings, anxieties, and regrets of a given era.” While Szalay identifies a new temporal structure that he argues characterizes our era of deindustrialization, Hipsky calls attention to a multilayered temporality shared by both the Victorian novel and the current long-format series, one that affords each medium the ability to naturalistically depict “the way we live now.” At the same time, Hipsky goes on to show, the juxtaposition of nineteenth-century novel and twenty-first-century series allows some historical changes to surface. While both are preoccupied with speculative finance, Succession is required to seek visual and spatial solutions for the challenge of representing an increasingly globalized, abstract, and fluctuating financial market. Succession's solutions, the essay concludes, “yield artistic inspiration to the critical theories of finance capitalism that we will need to keep generating.”
Thaïs Miller's essay tells the story of how new streaming technologies made possible the entrance of Jewish American women comedians and content creators into the heart of contemporary TV culture. Focusing on the professional paths of Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson (Broad City) and Rachel Bloom (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Miller shows how these comedians’ own transition from open-access digital streaming platforms, such as YouTube, to cable networks and SVOD, has enabled the migration of particularized narrative content—a combination of traditional Jewish humor and contemporary feminist sensitivities—from periphery to center stage.
Anat Sela Inbar examines the ways in which casting enables the cross-pollination of narratives among various serial television narratives. Because the proliferation of streaming services has enabled a wide range of television series to be available for watching and rewatching at any given moment, particular actors’ past roles have come to be particularly salient to the ways in which those actors’ new roles come to be framed and understood. Where the resonance of past performances has always been of interest to a given actor's superfans, the ghostly presence of past roles has more recently become an active consideration in deciding who should be cast in a given role. In Sela Inbar's telling, casting actors in ways that depart from their past performance history can function as a powerful instrument for complicating accepted cultural narratives.
Questions about the migration of narrative content and form from novel to TV and from traditional TV to streaming platforms are also at the heart of our interview with Hagai Levi, one of today's most innovative and successful TV creators (his work includes In Treatment, The Affair, Our Boys, and Scenes from a Marriage among others). Levi sheds light on what the economic and technological changes had meant not just for the industry as a whole, but for his own storytelling techniques and challenges. Since In Treatment has been remade in almost twenty countries and languages, the conversation then turns to a discussion of what characterizes new TV internationality. Levi discusses why adaptations have now largely replaced dubbing and subtitles, and what artistic choices this transition entails.
Picking up on the latter set of questions, Yona Hanhart-Marmor's comparison of the Israeli In Treatment (Betipul) with its French remake (En thérapie) demonstrates how large sociological insights can be gathered from small acts of narrative adaptation. While the French version appears at first to be a very close version of the Israeli original, almost a translation rather than a remake, a close reading of variation in cultural and historical references reveals the radically different “regimes of historicity” that undergird Israeli and French societies. Hanhart-Marmor shows that while En thérapie inserts characters and situations into a cultural longue durée, the Israeli version is fixated on the present and actively truncates the past. These divergent narrative choices reflect fundamental differences between Israeli and French worldviews.
The diverse analyses presented in this special issue underscore the intricate interplay between narrative form, economic structures, technological advancements, and cultural context that are shaping storytelling in the age of streaming. What comes next, with the end of “Peak TV”? In this era of uncertainty, one thing remains certain: the enduring power of storytelling to transform, adapt, and captivate audiences amid the industry's shifting affordances and limitations.
