Have you ever wondered how that one person on your Facebook feed is able to watch every scripted series, from NBC all the way to WGN America, in addition to drinking craft beer at warmly lit bars, eating delicious meals at artisanal restaurants, and using a bevy of hazy Instagram filters? So does Showtime president David Nevins.
“There may be too much good TV,” Nevins said at Showtime’s Television Critics Association presentation, echoing a statement by FX Networks boss John Landgraf earlier this week. “[But] there’s never enough great TV. And we’re trying hard to make great TV.”
“I long ago lost the ability to keep track of every scripted TV series, as I know you do, even though we all do this for a living,” Landgraf said. “ But this year, I finally lost track of the ability to keep track of every programmer who is in the scripted programming business.” (Neither of the Network heads offered an opinion on Crackle, per se, but they’re probably talking about shows on Crackle.)
And every streaming service and every network does seem to be getting into the scripted series game in recent years, a nice change of pace considering the boon of reality television in the early 2000s. But all bubbles must burst: The prime-time game show trend that was reborn after the success of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, for example, is now simply a segment on I Love The 2000s, excluding a few holdouts.
Landgraf’s been beating the death-of-TV drum for a while now; he remarked six months ago at the Winter TCA meeting that “the amount of competition is just literally insane.” Now the FX boss is predicting “a reversal of the escalating numbers of shows as well as the networks that provide them.” Once again, we assume he’s talking about Crackle.