MORE OF THE SAME
IT’S NINE IN THE EVENING, sometime during this endless post-lockdown liminal period, and I’m curled up on the sofa, clicking listlessly through streaming menus in search of my sedative of choice—dark teen dramas—when my vision starts to blur. Is Who Killed Sara? the new high school murder show I’ve been meaning to watch? Or Cruel Summer? The Wilds? One of Us Is Lying? The screen swims. I have to shut my overwhelmed eyes.
The condition is not entirely new, and though it seems to flare up only when I’m watching television, it has worsened over time. Which is concerning, because I am a TV critic. It presented, in early 2019, in the form of double vision: two documentaries, from Netflix and Hulu, about the disastrous Fyre Festival. Since then I’ve blinked through dueling originals on fashion design, Wu-Tang Clan, 9/11. Some of them are news-driven (proliferating Britney Spears docs), some seasonal (Baking Impossible, Bake Squad, Baker’s Dozen), some the repetition of a microgenre (rich people at a resort in HBO’s The White Lotus, rich people at a resort in Hulu’s lesser Nine Perfect Strangers).
I call this phenomenon—and the new era of television more broadly—peak redundancy. Every general-interest streaming service has a knockoff of every other platform’s breakout title or perennial favorite. But they aren’t just reverse-engineering one another’s hits; they’re also emulating one another’s ever expanding mix of content. Netflix has spent years stockpiling originals to serve every conceivable audience. Now other services that led with scripted series are dipping toes into reality and lifestyle, stand-up, sports and more. Each has at least one prestige murder mystery à la food shows, a trashy reality dating show (or five), creative competitions, newsy docs, teen dramas, children’s programs and true-crime fare. What might have begun as a strategy to court cord cutters looking to replace a whole suite of cable channels has escalated into a mandate to be everything to everyone.
