Back in the day, I can remember only 3 major primetime channels ... and ... if you wanted to change the channel you had to walk uphill in the snow to the TV set, both ways Television 2015: Is There Really Too Much TV? If you started on Jan. 1, 2016, and caught up with one scripted 2015 prime-time TV series per day, you could not finish by the end of the calendar year. Assign Jan. 1 to Mad Men, Jan. 2 to Orange Is the New Black, Jan. 3 to Modern Family and so on, knock out a whole show every single day, week in and week out, on Saturdays and Sundays and Flag Day and your birthday, and you will not make it. You won't even be close. That's how much television there is. That's how out of hand television is. Not reality television, not cupcake contests, not the Kardashians, not all the most popularly indicted signs of a supposed slack-jawed apocalypse brought about by abysmal taste. This is just original scripted shows. It's TV as we've known it for decades and decades. And a lot of it is pretty good. According to estimates provided to critics and reporters last week by the research team at FX Networks, more than 400 original scripted English-language series — just in prime time, not counting game shows, reality shows, documentary shows, daytime or nighttime talk shows, news or sports — will air on American television in 2015 before the year is out, meaning your one-show-a-day plan would come up painfully short. You wouldn't have made it this year with the shows from last year either, though you'd have gotten closer. The FX numbers say 2014 featured a total of 371 scripted series: 164 from basic cable, 145 from broadcast networks, 35 from pay cable and 27 from online services like Netflix. We were already up to 267 at the midpoint of 2015, which is how they estimate that in the end, it's going to be over 400. Project Catch-up 2015 would have ended on New Year's Eve with your disappointed gaze falling upon a tattered list of six stragglers; Project Catch-up 2016 would drag into the following February.
Too much TV was inevitable once Cable was introduced. With that many channels content was going to be developed to fill it. What this means for society is that it is no longer to have anyway for a TV show to define national culture. In 1983 the final episode of M*A*S*H was the highest viewed TV episode ever. No TV show can ever have that type of hold on our culture ever again.
Yeah this is true. But oh well. There are homebodies out there who watch them all I'm sure. I have a few I'll record, but I don't have time or the desire to watch everything that looks interesting.
I am pretty caught up on the ones I keep up with I am getting to the point of not looking for new shows Some shows don't date well so if i don't get into them early I doubt I will Rocket River
60% of all the channels are niche appeals (i.e. crap) You can filter them out of your "favorites" Guide on most systems. It takes a half an hour or so to go through the 200+ channels and filter it down to the 20 or 30 you care to scroll through.
It seems a little outdated to write about how many scripted TV shows there are. The whole industry is fragmenting because of the internet. A TV show won't get as many viewers because of competition off of the tv set. More shows will probably be made to be hosted on different kinds of platforms. The racket the cable companies were running to make you buy 100 channels you didn't want is crumbling. In 5 years, everything will be different and it won't even make sense to talk about programming made for tv.
First comment on the article is a good one. Are there too many books, too? Just pick and choose what interests you.
my wife can't get enough of the realityshow sh**. real housewives of any city (i believe there's like 5 or she is following) kardashians
But most of the channels are special interest based. Once football season starts, Pac 12 Network, SEC Network, Big Ten Network, All ESPN, Fox Sports channels, NFL Network, Redzone are good friends.
I think that's a euphemism for hooking up.... but I like being current on movies and shows, Netflix is so dated I only get it for 1 month in the Summer to watch House Of Cards.
If there's too much TV why do we get nonstop episodes of that Diners and Drive in shows with Guy Fieri on the Food Network. I swear they should just rename the channel to the Guy Fieri Network.
