The Revolution in American TV

During lockdown I thought it was time to catch up with some of the best-known American TV shows of the 1990s, especially ER and The X-Files. Both were much acclaimed, long-running shows. The X-Files was Fox TV’s first big TV drama. It ran from 1993 for nine seasons and 202 episodes. ER was an even bigger hit. Created by Michael Crichton, it launched the careers of George Clooney and Julianna Margulies (now better known for The Good Wife) and ran for 15 seasons and 331 episodes.

Looking back twenty-five years or so, it is surprising how clunky and old-fashioned both shows were. ER, in particular, looks like a TV dinosaur: sentimental, predictable, full of love interest and melodrama. It was part of the Lawyers, Cops ‘n’ Docs TV that filled the US networks at the time — LA Law, Law and Order, Homicide, Murder One, NYPD Blue and Chicago Hope.

These were network TV shows which aimed for, and reached, big primetime audiences. The result was a lot of good looking young (mainly white) actors falling in and out of love, intercut with melodramatic story lines.

The key point is these shows were all pre-HBO. January 1999 saw the launch of The Sopranos on HBO. It received 111 Emmy nominations and 21 Emmy awards. It was followed by other huge critical hits like Six Feet Under, an ensemble drama centring on the lives of a family managing a Los Angeles funeral home, David Simon’s The Wire, which revolutionised crime drama on American TV, and the 2003 miniseries Angels in America, the first (and to date, only) drama to sweep all seven major categories at the Primetime Emmys in the ceremony’s history. During the 2000s, HBO became a byword for classy TV: brilliantly written, acted and directed. For a whole generation, these dramas and comedies like Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm felt like a revolution, a new kind of grown-up TV.

HBO was middle class TV for big city audiences on the West and East coasts. It set the agenda for TV drama and created an audience for more recent cable hits like Fargo, True Detective, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black and Homeland. Instead of middlebrow network shows, the hot new names were AMC, FX, Showtime, Netflix and Amazon Prime. Disney recently put out the biggest musical of the last thirty years, Hamilton.

Instead of courtrooms and hospital ER rooms, TV drama moved to women’s prisons, Mexican drug dealers and CIA operatives fighting terrorists in Afghanistan. It wasn’t just the locations and the characters. TV became smarter. The dialogue was cleverer, the stories were darker, cable shows were more violent and sophisticated.

The new cable shows also attracted bigger names. As movies became more and more stupid, mall-fodder for teenagers, Hollywood stars like Toni Collette, Steve Buscemi, Robin Wright, Kevin Spacey, F Murray Abraham, Frances McDormand and James Woods moved to the small screen. Famous movie directors likewise. Martin Scorsese directed the pilot of Boardwalk Empire in 2010, John Madden directed the pilot of Masters of Sex in 2013, Ridley Scott produced Taboo for FX and David Fincher was an executive producer on House of Cards.

What HBO was for the 2000s, Netflix is for the 2020s, unless it gets overwhelmed by Disney and Apple. This is the biggest revolution in American TV and it’s spread to the UK. BritBox, the BBC and ITV won’t be able to compete. They don’t have the money and they don’t have the talent. It’s led to the biggest class divide in the history of British TV. Two generations of middle-class viewers watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney and Sky Atlantic; working class viewers are more likely to watch Sky and terrestrial TV. During the pandemic, most people I know turned to Netflix. It consolidated a cultural change that had already started a few years ago. Apart from the internet itself, it’s the biggest cultural revolution of our time.