Is the golden age of TV over now?

[Khal-a-bunga]

I highly doubt that Greenwald would entirely agree with that article today, given that TV has begun adopting more experimental story-telling options. In any case, I had come up with my top 25 shows of 2014 for another forum I visit, so I figured I'd post it here...

25. Getting On S.2 (may end up higher, but placing it and the 24th show in their positions because neither have finished their respective seasons)

24. The Affair S.1 ( ^ )

23. Black Jesus S.1

22. Justified S.4

21. Silicon Valley S.1

20. Masters of Sex S.2

19. Rick & Morty S.1

18. Banshee S.2

17. Broad City S.1

16. Shameless (U.S.) S.4

15. The Americans S.2

14. Orange Is The New Black S.2

13. Review S.1

12. Rectify S.2

11. Boardwalk Empire S.5

10. Louie S.4

9. The Knick S.1

8. Mad Men S.7-A

7. Veep S.3

6. Transparent S.1

5. The Leftovers S.1

4. Fargo S.A

3. Game of Thrones S.4

2. True Detective S.A

1. Hannibal S.2

And I could add a lot of honorable mentions (Sherlock, Girls, Looking, Penny Dreadful, etc). So no, I can't say that I agree with the idea that the 'Golden Age' of television is over.

[JonArryn]

Yeah, I've given it some thought and I don't think I can agree with it either. The golden age is probably not over, but it is maybe drawing to somewhat of a conclusion. Especially since we have "Westworld" coming up which is my most anticipated movie/tv show coming up. If they succed to pull it off, with the right story and themes I think "Westworld" will be one of the all time greats.

And we have to consider Mad Men (never seen this so I have to go by what I've heard) has some juice left and Breaking Bad just finished last year. So there's still a lot of potential. But it's also pretty safe to say it will always be hard to beat the years of 2000-2009 in tv, since it was kind of a massive period considering high quality tv. Today might not be quite as good as that period, but the golden age is still going on though.

[DaveSumm]

I'm pretty sure it's only The Wire and The Sopranos that make the 00's look so good, if you get rid of those (I don't think two shows is enough to qualify an 'age') then the 10's are on track to be as good as the previous decade.

[Maithanet]

I'm pretty sure it's only The Wire and The Sopranos that make the 00's look so good, if you get rid of those (I don't think two shows is enough to qualify an 'age') then the 10's are on track to be as good as the previous decade.

And even The Wire and Sopranos had flaws. I think the first season of True Detective compares favorably with any season from either of those two shows.

Now obviously, TD has maintain high quality for several more seasons before it could really be BETTER than them, but to claim the the Golden Age is over is just silly.

[JonArryn]

And even The Wire and Sopranos had flaws. I think the first season of True Detective compares favorably with any season from either of those two shows.

Now obviously, TD has maintain high quality for several more seasons before it could really be BETTER than them, but to claim the the Golden Age is over is just silly.

Of course they have flaws, all things do. But I think they're a lot of distance ahead of True Detective. TD's first 5 episodes were definitely as high quality as Wire and Sopranos, but the last three episodes, which are mediocre and kind of bad in some ways, drags the series down as a whole. Again, this is just my opinion.

[Mark Antony]

Deadwood always deserves a shout

Cocksuckin hoopleheads

[Werthead]

Also, True Detective is really a mini-series, or sequence of mini-series. It's a lot easier to hit out a home run with only a few episodes to concentrate the whole story, but then a lot harder to do that season after season after season. Might be worth re-visiting that a few years down the line.

[Weeping Sore]

Surely a graph of imdb rating times number of hours in a given year to quantify that given year's "goldenagedness". So in 1999 we'd have The Sopranos at 9.3 x 13 episodes or 120.9 (any other 9.0+ rated television shows airing in 1999? add them in.)

Then we could do the same for 2000, and so on and so forth. Eventually we would see the crest of the wave...

[Shryke]

I'm pretty sure it's only The Wire and The Sopranos that make the 00's look so good, if you get rid of those (I don't think two shows is enough to qualify an 'age') then the 10's are on track to be as good as the previous decade.

The talk of a golden age isn't because there were a bunch of great shows on at that point, but because The Sopranos began a complete change in how alot of TV was made. It wasn't that these shows were good specifically, it's that they created a new paradigm for cable television.

[polishgenius]

The talk of a golden age isn't because there were a bunch of great shows on at that point, but because The Sopranos began a complete change in how alot of TV was made. It wasn't that these shows were good specifically, it's that they created a new paradigm for cable television.

To be fair, I think Sopranos was just the natural extension of something that began with Babylon 5 and The West Wing, if you're talking about long-form storytelling. It may have been more extreme than them, but it certainly didn't begin there.

[Shryke]

To be fair, I think Sopranos was just the natural extension of something that began with Babylon 5 and The West Wing, if you're talking about long-form storytelling. It may have been more extreme than them, but it certainly didn't begin there.

The Sopranos was not famous just for long-form storytelling. It was the quality and style of storytelling and, more importantly for it being influential, the acclaim that it generated.

It basically firmly cemented and distributed the idea that television could be an art form just as profound and important as film.

[polishgenius]

The Sopranos was not famous just for long-form storytelling. It was the quality and style of storytelling and, more importantly for it being influential, the acclaim that it generated.

It basically firmly cemented and distributed the idea that television could be an art form just as profound and important as film.

I won't dispute that, I think it's giving too much credit- or at least giving too little credit to what went before- to say that the Sopranos began the movement. It may have been the starting moment of the golden age but it didn't come completely out of nowhere.

I think you're overlooking The West Wing in particular, there. Sure, the quality control may not have been as high, especially visually (and in terms of consistency thanks to the needs of the 22 episode network runs leading to filler), but it was a show that earned ludicrously good critical reviews at the time, and it broke ground by having both a highly-acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter and a big film star work in television, breaking big ground for the prestige thereof. Showrunning and acting in TV is a prestige thing now for film stars, but it wouldn't have happened without Sorkin and Sheen.

[Shryke]

I won't dispute that, I think it's giving too much credit- or at least giving too little credit to what went before- to say that the Sopranos began the movement. It may have been the starting moment of the golden age but it didn't come completely out of nowhere.

I think you're overlooking The West Wing in particular, there. Sure, the quality control may not have been as high, especially visually (and in terms of consistency thanks to the needs of the 22 episode network runs leading to filler), but it was a show that earned ludicrously good critical reviews at the time, and it broke ground by having both a highly-acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter and a big film star work in television, breaking big ground for the prestige thereof. Showrunning and acting in TV is a prestige thing now for film stars, but it wouldn't have happened without Sorkin and Sheen.

I don't think I'm overlooking the West Wing cause I don't think it counts at all. For one, it's a network show and the explosion of quality TV in the golden age has been cable-based. And secondly, I don't think it blazed any real trails. It doesn't have anything like the critical acclaim or impact of the Sopranos. It's just your average well received network drama and those have been around for ages. When people start listing off The Greats of TV, the West Wing is not or almost never on the short list.

[Werthead]

To be fair, I think Sopranos was just the natural extension of something that began with Babylon 5 and The West Wing, if you're talking about long-form storytelling. It may have been more extreme than them, but it certainly didn't begin there.

It depends on the definition. You can take it back to Hill Street Blues in the early 1980s as one of the first shows which did multi-length storylines, with season-spanning storylines, multi-episode character arcs and then subplots contained within single episodes, which Bocho then continued in LA Law and NYPD Blue before taking a bigger jump forward with it in Murder One.

But as Shryke says, serialisation isn't the whole story. There's also the importance of the shorter season, which came in more with cable shows which could focus more money and talent on 10-13 episodes than trying to do 22-26, which almost invariably resulted in a reasonable amount of filler. Budgets also had a lot to do with it, and that was more part of the story with cable (even the "low-budget" The Wire was only low budget by HBO standards, still costing $50 million by its third season or about the same as a 22-episode network procedural season).

There's also the Internet, which I think has enormously helped the "Golden Age" by becoming a forum for people to discuss TV shows and get people hooked on them. Not to mention piracy, which for TV has been much more important (and arguably helpful) than it has for other art forms in just getting awareness out there. It's not a coincidence that the explosion of such shows coincided with the spread of the net.

[polishgenius]

When people start listing off The Greats of TV, the West Wing is not or almost never on the short list.

I put "best tv show of all time" into google and grabbed three random links off the front page: The West Wing was top ten in two of them (whatculture's list was the one it didn't). Those aren't gonna be the only ones.

Whatever you think of The West Wing your own self, it certainly wasn't just another average drama, in terms of reception.

[Shryke]

I put "best tv show of all time" into google and grabbed three random links off the front page: The West Wing was top ten in two of them (whatculture's list was the one it didn't). Those aren't gonna be the only ones.

Whatever you think of The West Wing your own self, it certainly wasn't just another average drama, in terms of reception.

It also includes Friends. It's number one entry is The Simpsons. It's also got The X-Files and Sienfeld. Is these part of the Golden Age of television being talked about?

The answer is no. Because your lists aren't covering what we are talking about. This isn't about "Best TV Ever", but about a specific change in the way television was made, marketed and viewed. And The West Wing is not a part of that.

[JonArryn]

I put "best tv show of all time" into google and grabbed three random links off the front page: The West Wing was top ten in two of them (whatculture's list was the one it didn't). Those aren't gonna be the only ones.

Whatever you think of The West Wing your own self, it certainly wasn't just another average drama, in terms of reception.

Never seen The West Wing but I think you're right here polishgenius. The Emmys aren't always a credible source but when a series wins Best Drama four years in a row, like West Wing did, when it was up against a lot of tough competition, at least you can say it's a show that's above average. And from what I've hard, a lot of people put it as one of the best shows ever made. Sorkin is known for his writing and Sheen for his acting, so The West Wing was definitely a show part of the golden age. The supporting cast won a lot of Emmys too, so the acting was probably solid in general.

[Shryke]

What exactly do you feel that GoT loses (specifically, how we get to water-cooler show) in adaptation? I mean, I have a problem with the little changes they made but somehow I doubt that that's what's driving the sort of general coldness I'm seeing in this thread.

What's it lose? Nuance and an undercurrent of having something to say. Tyrion is a great example of this. The show flattens his character. It removes that parts of him that are self-serving and problematic and makes him a badass you cheer on.

The show very much feels like it's written by the kind of people who love the series because it's dark and gritty and shocking and didn't notice the part where it's subtle or subversive. I think the best example is that after The Red Wedding, the show runners were like "this is why we wanted to make this show" That's very telling about what they view as the important parts of the series.

I would also say generally their plotting when they have to or feel that have to deviate from what the book laid down is, imo, not that good. I could go on about other things like the directing as well, but all of that is not what I was specifically referring to above. And I literally couldn't give a shit that they changed stuff from the books since that's not bad on it's own.

Perhaps most simply, I don't think GOT is a show that really has anything interesting to say the way other critically acclaimed shows do. Whereas I think ASOIAF is definitely more then just gritty drama and shocking plottwists.

[Werthead]

Yeah, I have to say that The West Wing was huge and had a lot of critical respect up until the "Went on a season or two too long," point (which The Sopranos also had). Definitely part of the conversation. And The X-Files and Seinfeld are both often mentioned as precursors to the so-called Golden Age. Seinfeld is very dark and very twisted in places, has several long-running storylines (Season 4 and 7 even have full season-spanning story arcs) and was subversive in how it rippedt he piss out of the staid American sitcom formula whilst also remaining part of it. And of course it did directly give us Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I think most would agree is part of the Golden Age (if a minor one).

[polishgenius]

It also includes Friends. It's number one entry is The Simpsons. It's also got The X-Files and Sienfeld. Is these part of the Golden Age of television being talked about?

You never specified the golden age at that point, you just said that when people talk about 'the greats' of television, TWW isn't often in there. When it clearly is.

You appear to be approaching all my arguments at a side angle for some reason. I never said TWW was part of the golden age, but that it was one of the elements that led into it. Basically I'm seeing your position as that the golden age just swept out of nowhere to change viewing as we knew it and I'm disputing that; while it was radical, it was a development of things that had been building for some time.

You're also conveniently ignoring that when you defined a key feature of said golden age as being the bringing up the prestige of telly to be up their with film that TWW quite unquestionably broke ground there.

The shorter seasons is a fair point: it is one of the defining elements of cable television that make it superior for me that seasons are shorter. I think it's no coincidence that my favourite show at the moment is one that, while it's a network thing, has cable-length seasons.

Yeah, I have to say that The West Wing was huge and had a lot of critical respect up until the "Went on a season or two too long,"

TWW's problem wasn't that it went on too long, but that Sorkin left after season 4. They struggled to find their feet after that, season 7 was actually considerably stronger than the two previous to that, once they'd worked out something to actually aim for.

Perhaps most simply, I don't think GOT is a show that really has anything interesting to say the way other critically acclaimed shows do. Whereas I think ASOIAF is definitely more then just gritty drama and shocking plottwists.

Possibly the reason I'm one of those that thinks the show is roughly equal to the books is that I don't really see aSoIaF as much more than that.

Also I would say that while the show does indeed flatten and lose nuance in some characters, in others it does considerably better. The relationship between Tywin and Arya being of particular note.