Welcome to Golden Ages, a five-part series this week about four of Hollywood’s most fertile eras, the elements that had to come together for them to produce such iconic works, what went right and why – and, of course, how each of them ultimately fell apart. We’ve covered the 1930s, 1970s And 1990s. Today: Prestige TV 1999–2016.
Our last Golden Age represents a sharp turn from previous eras. Hollywood’s last Golden Age was a Golden Age of Television.
In the eras I have studied, television almost acted as a coach for film – it pushed the medium of cinema to its limits, to excel. While television threatened to swallow up cinema audiences at various times, and it undoubtedly produced some impressive, groundbreaking works, overall it was never a real creative threat to the medium of film.
Around 2000, that changed. In a very short period of time, television went from being a bumbling, over-working loser to being a kid whose house was the place everyone wanted to play, draining the best talent – and with it much of the industry’s energy and creativity. Eventually, it reached such a critical mass that it was close to swallowing the business whole.
For a medium that had only moved a few inches forward since its inception to suddenly produce shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad And Veep was an incredible leap forward.
So where did this burst of creativity come from? What circumstances enabled broadcasters not only to take this big leap but also to build on it?
HBO’s The Sopranos is widely regarded as the beginning of this Golden Age with its debut in January 1999. Some pedants set the milestone at Oz (1997) or such network precursors as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997). But we leave that to the historians.
The bigger question is when that period ended…if it ever ends. Recent shows like Shogun, The Crown, Fargo And The bear Are creatively on par with the series that gave HBO its first breakthroughs, and the creativity of these shows is undoubtedly as high as ever.
The recent statements that “peak times on television are over” revolved around the Fall off in production quantity rather than quality.
So if we were to chart the length of this Golden Age, I would suggest the end point was the moment when prestige TV became top-tier television. Quality never stopped, but at some point the story of this era became more about the growth of services than original shows. FX’s John Landgraf gave his first speech in 2015 lamenting that there was “too much television.” game of Thrones A year later, he had what was probably his last great season, his sixth, so let’s set our markers at 1999 to 2016.
