peak TV

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It

by Robert B. Reich  · 24 Mar 2020  · 154pp  · 47,880 words

religion, law enforcement, the physical infrastructure, the news media, the bedrock virtues of civility and community. Nearly everything has turned to crap, it seems, except Peak TV (for those who can afford it).” He might have added the environment and our democracy. The concentration of wealth in America has created an education

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality

by Jaron Lanier  · 21 Nov 2017  · 480pp  · 123,979 words

Netflix and HBO were able to get people to pay for subscriptions for good TV. Suddenly we’re in a renaissance that has been dubbed Peak TV.) Your friends, lovers, purchases, and insecure gig economy gigs are brought to you by acts of misdirection that echo Netflix’s moot algorithm. A bounty

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier  · 28 May 2018  · 151pp  · 39,757 words

to challenge it. But then companies like Netflix and HBO convinced people to pay a monthly fee, and the result is what is often called “peak TV.” Why couldn’t there also be an era of paid “peak social media” and “peak search”? Watch the end credits on a movie on Netflix

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America

by Alissa Quart  · 25 Jun 2018  · 320pp  · 90,526 words

programs of my childhood presented very different rich people from the wealthy we see on TV today, in television’s golden age—otherwise known as “peak TV.” Peak TV shows include The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men. Premium cable, with its loosened content restrictions and quality programming, has made possible a period of

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Institute, 257 Parkland College, 37 Parton, Dolly, 251 Paternity leave, 15–16, 24–27, 29–30, 50 “Patriarchy,” 21 Patrice, Joe, 106 “Pay transparency,” 29 Peak TV, 217 Pema (nanny), 118 Personality tests, 179 Pew Research Center, 4, 9, 129, 218 Pharmacy robots, 225–27 Phillips, Anne, 263 Platform cooperativism, 157–60

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World

by Anupreeta Das  · 12 Aug 2024  · 315pp  · 115,894 words

, 171, 175, 245, 248, 271, 274 Tuna, Cari, 206 Tunney Act, 73 Turner, Ted, 131–132, 134, 136 Turner Foundation, 131 Twain, Mark, 20 Twin Peaks (TV series), 267 Twitter, see X TXU (utility company), 269 Tye, John, 233 U2, 100 Uber, 58 Ukraine, Russian invasion of, 279 “Unconfuse Me with Bill

Chokepoint Capitalism

by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow  · 26 Sep 2022  · 396pp  · 113,613 words

Manager.” 7. Writers Guild of America, Annual Financial Report, June 29, 2019, https://www.wga.org/uploadedfiles/the-guild/annual-report/annualreport19.pdf; John Koblin, “Peak TV Hits a New Peak, with 532 Scripted Shows,” New York Times, Jan. 9, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/business/media/tv-shows

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success

by Ross Douthat  · 25 Feb 2020  · 324pp  · 80,217 words

to relate to one another anymore.) And TV’s golden age may have been a temporary thing, succeeded quickly by the rather different age of “peak TV,” in which the flood of content is overwhelming but also often algorithmically optimized, tending inevitably toward its own forms of repetition, mediocrity, the safe imitation

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide

by Steven W. Thrasher  · 1 Aug 2022  · 361pp  · 110,233 words

transgender women transphobia Treatment Action Group (TAG) Truman, Harry Trump, Donald Truvada Tryon, Andrew tuberculosis (TB) Tuscaloosa City Council “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis” Twin Peaks (TV show) Twitter Types of Mankind (Nott and Gliddon) typhoid fever typhus Tyson Foods U (short film) Uber Eats UBS Ugly Laws, The (Schweik) undocumented unemployment

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO

by Felix Gillette and John Koblin  · 1 Nov 2022  · 575pp  · 140,384 words

a second career in television. By the late 2010s, the TV industry was neck-deep into a new era of superabundance, often referred to as Peak TV. With Netflix and other well-funded streaming services pouring billions of dollars into original programming—and traditional networks like HBO trying to keep up—the

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magazine and newspaper empires of the twentieth century were desperately cutting weight, a steady migration of talent was being steered into the welcoming arms of Peak TV. Just two decades after Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell had greeted her small-screen suitors with indifference, the TV industry was now a

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,” Rolling Stone, July 27, 2017. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “They just overwhelmed us”: Michael Schneider, “FX’s John Landgraf on the State of Peak TV, and the Network ‘Arms Race,’ ” TV Insider, January 16, 2016. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Back in early 2007: Alex Ben Block, “How HBO

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Tension and Thrilling Surreality of HBO’s ‘Watchmen,’ ” New Yorker, October 18, 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT According to one estimate: Michael Schneider, “Peak TV Tally, According to FX Research,” Variety, January 12, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Though only in his midthirties: Lucy Feldman, “Playwright Branden Jacobs

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, 342 Parsifal International, 258 Parsons, Richard Albrecht arrest and, 195 replaces Levin as head of AOL Time Warner, 154–55 Paxton, Bill, 187 PBS, 30 Peak TV, 331–32 Pelecanos, George, 290 Penney, John, 181–82, 204, 212 permanent campaign strategy, 67–68, 107–8, 206 Perrineau, Harold, 103 Perry, Matthew, 50

Pandora's Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV

by Peter Biskind  · 6 Nov 2023  · 543pp  · 143,084 words

streaming services. “Golden age,” of course, is a tired cliché flung about with little discrimination, so we’ll call this second one the era of “Peak TV,” a phrase coined by John Landgraf, CEO of the cable channel FX, who estimated there were a record 559 scripted originals in 2022. Maybe the

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from Denmark, as well as so-called Nordic noir like The Bridge, also from Denmark. Altogether, these shows have created the brave new world of Peak TV. It is no exaggeration to say that the sweep and depth of HBO’s shows, followed by those of the basic cable channels, propelled TV

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said and done, we will be a small piece of thread in Elmore’s coattail.”41 By the time Justified was approaching its last season, Peak TV was in full flower, with approximately 349 original scripted series. Especially in the later seasons of the show, there were so many series on cable

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AMC was airing old movies and looking for its Sopranos, The X-Files was spawning some of the talent that would go on to create Peak TV. Among them was Vince Gilligan, who was ending his stint as a regular writer and then producer. Gilligan was a screenwriting prodigy, discovered in Virginia

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’t a hit.”20 It was a sad conclusion to Milch’s career. Of all the insanely talented writers who contributed to the era of Peak TV, Milch was perhaps the most gifted. Luck had been a disaster, mostly of HBO’s own making, and worse, an embarrassment. Nothing clicked until the

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pennies? Will we be winners or losers? Nobody expects this golden age of television to last forever; some have already pronounced 2022 the peak of Peak TV. As FX’s John Landgraf—who, we remember, coined the term—ominously puts it, “TV is analogous to some of the golden ages in cinema

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when Pulp Fiction broke the $100 million ceiling for indies and Miramax, which produced it, became an attractive acquisitions target for Disney. The era of Peak TV has already exceeded that flicker of creativity by decades, thanks to the streamers that dominate today’s entertainment space, but their future is the subject

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the latter may face is phony. This suggests that these series don’t so much resemble novels, the template that defined much of the early Peak TV era, and that carries with it a certain gravitas with its commitment to behavioral authenticity in which actions have consequences—that they don’t have

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writing anti-heroes.”53 As networks continue to dump their shows onto the streamers, while streamers race to the mainstream, the discomfort shows that defined Peak TV are already beginning to get a lot of flak. Netflix’s Ozark took some heat because the Byrds get away with their crimes. Laura Linney

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in her or his head. I wish to thank Mauro DiPreta of William Morrow for giving me the opportunity to write about this age of Peak TV, as well as Andrew Yackira for steering me through the thicket of notes and copyediting, and likewise, Allie Johnston. My agent, David Halpern, gave me

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Parker, Sarah Jessica, 22–23 Party of Five, 34 Pascal, Pedro, 260 passion projects, 234 Patriot Act, 199 Paul, Aaron, 135 Paull, Michael, 273–274 Peak TV, 114, 133, 291, 311 Pearman, Victoria, 173 Perkins, Elizabeth, 147 Perlmutter, Ike, 243–244, 275–276 Perrette, J. B., 312 PETA (People for the Ethical