When "The Wire" came out, "The Sopranos", "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul", I thought "woo hoo! We are in the golden age of television!" Then I read about th

When "The Wire" came out, "The Sopranos", "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul", I thought "woo hoo! We are in the golden age of television!" Then I read about the billions(!) being dropped into new productions of classics like "The Wheel of Time" or a spinoff of "Lord of the Rings" This was a great feeling! Then all of those billions started delivering. If you were _lucky_, season one was put together with tons of care and picked over. It was also based on a novel series where the author had done the same. If you were unlucky, the TV became like the radio used to be: just background stuff while you do something else. You don't even pay attention to it. No matter what, season two almost always had the dramatic quality of a baked potato. And heaven forbid the algorithmic numbers don't work. Then the thing is a dead series walking no matter what the quality. You can't make quality art by throwing money at it. Very strangely, it actually has the opposite effect: people stop wanting to take risks. You can make a somewhat mathematically-sound four-quadrant marketing pitch hoping to hit the right taste clusters with a guess at whether it'll work or not, but you're not looking at emotional impact over time. Hell no. Hence the current tidal wave of edgy mediocrity. I leave the TV on in the afternoons when I'm not working and trying to decompress. I have seen a few good series. They are all lower-budget attempts by high-quality artists using a preexisting literary work. Too often, without a solid canon of literary work, season one is great and the rest of it is just doubling down on whatever stimulus was in season one that the algorithm said people liked. My opinion is that people are going to like "classic" TV the same way they like classic rock. There'll be something about it that they'll argue about endlessly, but there'll also be a lot of derivative work trying to recapture the lightning of actually knowing what the hell you're doing and being lucky.