News Reporter: Act Four: How much television can we afford?

Friday, 20 May 2016

Act Four: How much television can we afford?

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

An image from “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday.” (Glen Wilson/Netflix)

Over at Vulture this week, my friends Joe Adalian and Maria Elena Fernandez published a fantastic look at how the television business is changing with the rise of outlets like Netflix and Hulu, the rising number of original scripted shows that are being ordered and put on air, and the influx of movie stars into television. And that’s just a few of the factors they examine.

It’s a fascinating and important piece, and I learned a lot about how the finances of television are shifting around. Syndication revenue is way down, both because re-runs aren’t performing as well as they used to and because the networks that used to stock their schedules with syndicated shows from other networks are now making more of their own original shows. Showrunners are making less money, in part because of the decline of syndication. Actors are becoming more reluctant to audition, even as the movement from movies to television is pushing established television actors from leading roles into supporting ones.

One thing Adalian and Fernandez don’t address in their exploration of how much television outlets will pay to make is how much television audiences will pay to watch. There’s some speculation at the end of the piece that we might be in a bubble. But how might that bubble grow or bust? If cord-cutters take the money they’re spending on cable and move it over to streaming services, how many will they be able to afford, and how many will they want to buy?

The fact that Netflix doesn’t release any data about who watches their shows and in what numbers makes it harder to figure out this question. If we knew that, say, 10 million people were watching “Jessica Jones” and “Daredevil” all the way through each season, we’d be able to make a pretty fair guess about what sorts of shows might draw people. And the cable bundle obscures things in a similar way: other than premium channels such as HBO, we can’t tell exactly what networks people are really buying, much less what shows. Until we know what it is that audiences actually want to pay to see, it will be hard to know how high peak TV can climb, and how long it can last.