When did “prestige TV” jump the shark, or maybe just get chomped up in its jaws? Flip around for something to watch, and you’ll find star-crammed absurdities (“The Morning Show,” “Only Murders in the Building”), I.P.-brand extensions (“Wednesday,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi”), “Yellowstone” spinoffs, or, under the banner of the once genre-busting HBO, rehashes of better shows (“House of the Dragon,” “And Just Like That . . .”). When a worthy new series breaks out (“Reservation Dogs,” “The Bear”), it feels like an anomaly, and just as many get prematurely cancelled (“A League of Their Own,” “Winning Time”). Many streaming services are cutting costs and curbing output while casting around for the broadest possible audience. We used to say that twenty-first-century TV was like the nineteenth-century novel—instead of staring at the idiot box, we were communing with Dickens or Zola!—but at some point that stopped seeming true.
What happened? One answer is what always happens: golden ages never last. Just look at the New Hollywood of the late nineteen-sixties and seventies, which gave us such boundary-pushing classics as “Midnight Cowboy,” “The Godfather,” and “Taxi Driver.” “At its most ambitious, the New Hollywood was a movement intended to cut film free of its evil twin, commerce, enabling it to fly high through the thin air of art,” Peter Biskind writes in “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood” (1998), his rollicking overview of the era. In the late sixties, Biskind recounts, the crumbling studios were held in the “rigor-mortis-like grip” of aging moguls who had no idea how to speak to a young audience. That left an opening for counterculture hits like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Easy Rider,” Dennis Hopper’s hippie motorcycle odyssey, which made sixty million dollars on a six-figure budget. Upstart auteurs—Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola—had the run of the town. Bewildered executives were suddenly barking, “Get me the next ‘Godfather’!”
Then, as Biskind tells us, the “movie brats” Steven Spielberg and George Lucas came along with “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” which restored the reign of commerce, complete with sequels and Luke Skywalker action figures. Of course, commerce had never really left; it had just lost its footing, except in the case of a few producers—Bert Schneider, Robert Evans—hip enough to bottle the counterculture. In the late seventies, the business reoriented itself, with the rise of the mega-agencies I.C.M. and C.A.A. and of a new breed of executive (Michael Eisner, Barry Diller). Many of the renegade directors self-destructed in a blaze of coke and ego, or joined the counter-revolution of the blockbuster eighties.
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Biskind, a longtime contributor to Vanity Fair and one of Hollywood’s shrewdest chroniclers, followed “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” with “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film” (2004), another panorama of a short-lived creative efflorescence. In the late eighties, Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” came out of the U.S. Film Festival (the future Sundance) and kick-started a movement of grungy, low-budget indies that counterbalanced Hollywood bloat. Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax acquired the film and used it, along with Gen X hits like Kevin Smith’s “Clerks,” to break out of the “art-house ghetto.” The big money followed: Disney acquired Miramax for sixty million dollars; “Pulp Fiction” became the first indie to pass the hundred-million mark; and “Indiewood” was born, with Fox Searchlight and Sony Pictures Classics competing on the film-festival circuit. (“Get me the next ‘Pulp Fiction’!”) By the turn of the millennium, Miramax was spending big on middlebrow fare like “The Cider House Rules” and “Kate & Leopold,” the kind of stuff the studios made. As Soderbergh laments to Biskind, “The independent film movement, as we knew it, just doesn’t exist anymore.”
Like many Hollywood sagas, Biskind’s turns out to be a trilogy. His latest book, “Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV” (William Morrow), explains, in punchy, propulsive prose, how we went from Tony Soprano to Ted Lasso. Biskind’s turn to television is telling: the movies, he sighs, are stuck in “superhero monoculture.” Soderbergh, who directed the Cinemax series “The Knick,” reappears to complain, “The audience for the kinds of movies I grew up liking has migrated to television.” Not network television, mind you—Biskind dismisses it, somewhat ungenerously, as “a measureless tract of hard, cracked soil, inhospitable to intelligent life”—but the other kind, starting with HBO.
Michael Fuchs, who joined the pay-cable company in 1976 and was fired in 1995, tells Biskind that he set out to produce counterprogramming to the stuff put out by the “homogenized, fake” broadcast networks. Freed of the standards-and-practices departments that kept the networks neutered, he put on boxing matches and risqué docuseries such as “Real Sex,” all geared toward men. “HBO was an insurgency,” Fuchs says. By the mid-nineties, it was expanding into edgy original series, including “Oz,” a prison drama whose pilot ends with a main character getting burned alive—not exactly “Touched by an Angel.” “Oz” primed audiences for “The Sopranos,” which premièred in 1999 and completed HBO’s metamorphosis, as Biskind writes, “from a fighting-and-fondling irritant to the networks into the Rolls-Royce of cable.”
We meet the three HBO Davids: Chase, Simon, and Milch—the headstrong, high-strung men who reinvented the Mob drama (“The Sopranos”), the crime procedural (“The Wire”), and the Western (“Deadwood”), respectively. Biskind is skilled at the quick character sketch. Chase, he writes, “is a slender man, with deep-set eyes, a broad expanse of forehead, and a mouth that alternates between wry amusement and a frown, as if he has bitten into a lemon.” With “The Sopranos,” Chase ushered in a serialized format that prized moral ambiguity and rewarded patient viewing. “On network, everybody says exactly what they’re thinking,” he tells Biskind. “I wanted my characters to be telling lies.”
The “Sopranos” writers’ room could reflect the sort of scheming that defined its onscreen characters; Biskind calls it “a hellhole of competitiveness and backbiting.” Midway through the sixth season, Chase abruptly fired the writer Robin Green, like Tony whacking Big Pussy. In “Deadwood,” Milch projected himself onto the Old West impresario Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox), “who was supposed to illustrate the power of the artist over the power of the capitalist,” Biskind writes. Of course, the talent-versus-suits morality tale that undergirds Biskind’s books is never that clean. HBO cancelled “Deadwood” after three seasons, citing its high budget, but Cox recalls someone describing its demise as a “Jewish pissing contest” between the volatile Milch and HBO’s chairman and C.E.O., Chris Albrecht. If the rising television auteurs were the new Coppolas and Altmans, they could be just as power-mad and self-immolating. The shows of HBO’s golden age offered stories of brutal patriarchies headed by charismatic antiheroes, which is what HBO was, too. In May, 2007, Albrecht was arrested for choking his girlfriend in the parking lot of a Las Vegas hotel, and resigned. (Three years later, he was running Starz.)
HBO, meanwhile, was flush with money, top-heavy with executives, and the envy of Hollywood. (“Get me the next ‘Sopranos’!”) After “The Sopranos” ended, in 2007, HBO had a dearth of juggernauts; Milch followed up “Deadwood” with the disastrous “John from Cincinnati.” The drought ended in 2011, with the arrival of “Game of Thrones.” But rivals were already filling the void. Showtime realized that women could be antiheroes, and put out “Weeds” and “Homeland.” Basic cable had entered the fray. FX had the tough guys of “The Shield” and “Justified.” AMC, which had been a second-rate Turner Classic Movies, picked up “Mad Men” after HBO passed on Matthew Weiner’s pilot, and then followed it with Vince Gilligan’s “Breaking Bad.” For a time, AMC was hot—until it zombified itself into a “Walking Dead” spinoff factory.
HBO, defending its turf, scooped up big-name authors and directors, among them Margaret Atwood and Noah Baumbach, in what the industry terms “schmuck insurance”; the development deals meant that HBO wouldn’t see a project it rejected being peddled elsewhere and possibly becoming a hit. The risk-taking era was receding. Albrecht’s successor Richard Plepler tells Biskind, “We were under tremendous pressure to deliver more and more money to an earnings-based corporation that prevented us from expanding our programming, and that was just the reality of being part of Time Warner.”
The story of these turbulent masterminds and their antihero doubles has been told in any number of books, including, ten years ago, Brett Martin’s “Difficult Men,” which critics compared to “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.” Biskind has the benefit of having waited to see the other side of Peak TV’s peak. In retrospect, a pivotal moment came in 2011, when David Fincher was shopping around “House of Cards,” about another seductive antihero: a devious congressman who plots his way into the Oval Office—and who, in his first scene, kills a dog. “I don’t spend any time in D.C., but I spend a lot of time in Hollywood,” Fincher would tell people. “If you’re talking about hubris and venality, they’re not that different.” The show’s natural home was HBO, which offered to shoot the pilot and see. Fincher had lined up big stars, Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, and wanted a thirteen-episode commitment. That wasn’t the way business was done, certainly not at HBO, which was mired, Biskind says, in “internecine warfare, bad calls, and overdevelopment.” Then Fincher got an offer that blew HBO out of the water: a hundred million dollars for not one but two full seasons. It came from Netflix.
The company was founded in the late nineties, by the computer scientist Reed Hastings and the entrepreneur Marc Randolph. Hastings, according to Randolph, wanted to create “the Amazon.com of something.” Randolph suggested home video. Netflix amassed subscribers by mailing out DVDs. It began streaming in 2007. Hastings, convinced that he could mine user data to pinpoint what customers wanted to watch, started researching “taste clusters.” He spent one family ski vacation holed up in a Park City chalet, tinkering with his algorithm. The studios kept licensing out content, thinking little of it. David Zaslav, now the C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Discovery, tells Biskind, “They fed Netflix when Netflix looked like a harmless animal. And then they were stuck having to continue to feed it, when it was clear that Netflix was a beast.” In 2010, Jeff Bewkes, the C.E.O. of HBO’s parent company, Time Warner, made one of those deathless “We’ll be greeted as liberators” statements when he said, of Netflix, “Is the Albanian Army going to take over the world? I don’t think so.”
With “House of Cards,” which premièred in early 2013, Netflix established itself as a purveyor of original series to rival HBO’s. Jenji Kohan’s “Orange Is the New Black” came later that year, helping to boost Netflix’s stock price five hundred and sixty-six per cent. For both shows, Netflix dropped the entire first season at once, creating a model of viewership known as binge-watching. The Albanian Army had arrived. Showrunners flocked to this newfound haven of creative freedom, which seemed willing to throw money at something weird or dark. “Before you knew it, you had a revolution within the revolution,” Biskind writes.
In Peak TV terms, consider the opening map from “Game of Thrones”: HBO was the arrogant Lannister clan of King’s Landing; FX and AMC were the brooding Starks of the North; and Netflix was the Targaryens, invading from across the sea with the help of a fire-breathing dragon—Hastings’s algorithm. Now Big Tech got in the game: Amazon premièred “Transparent” on its streaming service in 2014; Apple launched Apple TV+ in 2019, bearing “The Morning Show.” The tech giants “flooded the streaming space with money,” Biskind writes. But, as the FX chief John Landgraf, who coined the term “Peak TV,” tells him, “you don’t make art just by throwing money at it.” The legacy studios sprinted into the streaming wars, with Disney+, Paramount+, and Peacock. WarnerMedia funnelled HBO—along with DC superheroes and other properties—into HBO Max, designed to reach a broader audience than the premium-cable mother ship. The merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery, in 2022, turned Zaslav into a Hollywood power player. In a twist that the author of “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” might have found a little on the nose, Zaslav had acquired the storied home from which Robert Evans ran Paramount during its New Hollywood renaissance.
Zaslav lacked his predecessor’s palate, though. His streaming outlet, renamed Max, is now the place, Biskind laments, “where you go to watch Batman spinoffs” or reruns of “Gossip Girl.” Fuchs delivers the eulogy. “This is a fifty-year-old company,” he told Biskind last year. “I consider that it died at fifty. There’s no longer an HBO.” But all the outlets were getting more cautious. In the spring of 2022, Netflix told its investors that it had lost two hundred thousand subscribers in the year’s first quarter, and its value plummeted. The “Great Netflix Correction” effectively ended streaming’s roll-the-dice era, and although Netflix itself recovered, its debt-saddled competitors were running scared. Hungry for subscribers, the streamers developed an “allergy to risk,” Biskind observes, leaning harder on preëxisting I.P., movie stars, and comfort viewing. Netflix and Amazon recruited executives from network TV, with the goal, in Biskind’s words, of “reaching as big an audience as cheaply as possible.” Now the algorithm rules us all.
“Pandora’s Box” is as unsparing as “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” and the thesis of the two books is the same: Hollywood’s golden ages don’t arise from the miraculous congregation of geniuses. The industry’s default setting is for crap. Occasionally, the incentives change just enough to allow a cascade of innovation, but those incentives inevitably shift back to the norm. Many streamers, including Netflix, are now launching ad-supported tiers, meaning that they’ll be answerable to the same sponsors that propped up the networks. We’ve come full circle. “The post-network streaming world could turn out to look very much like the pre-streaming broadcast world,” Biskind concludes. “Instead of the Big Four networks, we might see Big Five Streamers.” Fewer protagonists are likely to murder a dog.
Then again, what if something else has been happening, something not cyclical but transformative? Midway through “Pandora’s Box,” the shows under discussion signal a vibe shift. “The Sopranos” and its progeny of ruthless male antiheroes give way to “Orange Is the New Black,” “Girls,” “Insecure,” “Transparent,” and “I May Destroy You”—shows that empowered female, queer, and Black creators and offered complicated protagonists reflecting a wider range of identities.
This, too, tracked a change in the marketplace: suddenly, it was seen as good business to diversify the screen, even if C-suites stayed demographically stagnant. Amid the backstabbing boys’ clubs, “Pandora’s Box” is littered with talented female executives who were unceremoniously ousted, including Carolyn Strauss at HBO, Cindy Holland at Netflix, and Christina Wayne at AMC. “It was the most devastating thing that had ever happened to me,” Wayne recalls of her firing, in 2009. “And may they rot in hell, is all I can say.” Matthew Weiner was also appalled at Wayne’s dismissal. According to Wayne, he lambasted the male executives at a black-tie event for “Mad Men,” saying, “You just didn’t want her there because your penises are too small.”
Not that Weiner himself comes off well. “There was often drinking and getting high after five or six, and I really felt like he was recapitulating the atmosphere of the show,” the writer Marti Noxon tells Biskind. “He wanted to be Don Draper, and he’s not. The women just fell into Don Draper’s arms, but with Matt it was manipulation and power, targeting people about their bodies and their sexuality day in, day out, and an assumption that you have to play to his good side.” In late 2017, another “Mad Men” writer, Kater Gordon, accused Weiner of sexual harassment, a claim he denied.
In “Pandora’s Box,” the #MeToo movement is a passing plot development. But it’s the engine behind Maureen Ryan’s galvanizing “Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood” (Mariner). In her view, “a lot of beliefs and norms still enshrouding Hollywood are in dire need of reboots,” first and foremost the notion that “creative people are ‘temperamental,’ and that that word—along with ‘passionate,’ ‘driven,’ and ‘difficult’—automatically encompasses some terrible things.” Ryan reports on a variety of “toxic” workplaces, among them the producer Scott Rudin’s office and the writers’ room for “Lost,” unveiling a horror show of “nightmare narcissists, well-connected incompetents, and garden-variety abusers,” along with the corporate instinct to silence victims and maintain business as usual.
Ryan—like Biskind, a longtime entertainment reporter and a Vanity Fair contributor—focusses less on the machinations of high-powered monsters than on the assistants and junior writers who endured their misbehavior. She says that hearing about Hollywood’s abuses for years left her in a “haze of exhaustion and fear.” Aaron Sorkin’s half-hearted response to Rudin’s alleged workplace bullying gave her “rage migraines.” But she’s had enough, and now she’s lighting a match.
Among the myths that Ryan wishes to torch is “the Myth of a Golden Age.” “The vast majority of the most buzzed-about Golden Age shows featured heterosexual white dudes at the center of their sagas, which was, honestly, just a continuation of what Hollywood had been doing forever,” she writes. In 2014, as a TV critic for the Huffington Post, she wrote a piece titled “Who Creates Drama at HBO? Very Few Women or People of Color.” A high-level executive from the company e-mailed her, saying that the headline was unfair and asking her to change it. She refused.
In a section on “Toxic Myths Around Creativity,” Ryan takes on “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” itself. “Throughout the book, women (and some men) sigh at a wide array of Creative Guy antics like these, many of which were fueled by insecurity and rivalry, not to mention drugs and alcohol,” she writes. “I have talked to so many people who have encountered various flavors of miserable-prick energy throughout their industry careers, and they are, in a word, tired.”
To be fair, “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” doesn’t set out to glamorize the misbehavior of the New Hollywood, but no doubt some of its readers—especially aspirants who go to L.A. planning to be the next Dennis Hopper—see what they want to see. In that sense, Biskind has something in common with David Chase, who viewed “The Sopranos” as a show “about evil” and was disturbed by the subset of fans who wanted “less yakking, more whacking.” If Biskind, like Chase, lays out a sprawling, amoral ecosystem with the dispassion of an omniscient narrator, Ryan is more akin to Michaela Coel, the creator and star of “I May Destroy You”: personal, indignant, and unimpressed by “big-swinging-dick” behavior. Ryan is also more hopeful, despite the rage migraines. Where “Pandora’s Box” mourns the end of an era, Ryan sees “the beginning stages of the entertainment industry’s shift to better models.”
Both books bring Hollywood’s recent history to the precipice of the double strike of the writers’ and actors’ guilds. For Biskind, whose book goes up to the start of the writers’ strike, in May, the picket lines are one more sign of the devolution of Peak TV. Ryan’s book went to press earlier, and it only hints at the labor clash to come. But she’s attuned to the conditions that led to it: “The shred of hope that many used to nurture—that a job on a twenty-two-episode show might provide a measure of job security—is, for many, pretty much gone.” Maybe a Hollywood that’s more equitable and less in thrall to “temperamental geniuses” will bring its own kind of golden age. “I want to burn Hollywood down some days, I really do,” Ryan writes. “And then I fall in love with a TV show or a movie and I want to know everything about it.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated Marc Randolph’s name.
