The revolution in american tv | thearticle

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.