Has Prestige TV Worn Out its Welcome?

I have to admit that from the start I have been at best reserved toward prestige TV--here and there giving something a chance (Mad Men, Game of Thrones, etc., etc.) but never finding cause to stick with it much past season three. Rather those experiences persuaded me that the grounds for praise were at best superficial and simplistic, and that the critics, in fact, were looking less and less like shills and more and more like the utterly unhinged.

If always conscious of espousing a minority view I have not always been wholly alone. (Mark Greif, Daniel Mendlesohn, Marc Tracy, produced fairly incisive pieces about the show's limitations.) Still, such were few and far between, and it seems notable that the more critical pieces about the show tended to appear in the show's latter days rather than its earlier ones--with the same going for the prestige TV boom generally. Only a few years ago, for example, did we see critics start to acknowledge that prestige TV mostly consisted of a pack of clichés whose appeal, unlike that of so many other fictional clichés, is doubtful, this stuff basically wrapping up content which is pedestrian or worse in postmodernist grimdarkness and ambiguity and pretension--such that, in Elizabeth Alsop's analysis, its makers "exploit viewers' love" of such pulpy material as "swordplay, zombies and serial killers, while denying them the lurid pleasures therein" in "punitive pulps," in stark contrast with the unashamedly, wholehearted pulp of which they are so derivative (and which actually delivers the promised satisfactions).

Meanwhile prestige TV's novelties--its story arcs, big budgets, movie stars casts and "adult content--have become rather shopworn a quarter of a century after the debut of The Sopranos. In some cases they have even become liabilities, with the sexual aspect of such television seeming a particularly noteworthy case, the more in as those writing for mainstream venues are so inhibited about discussing it. The fact is that the shows present nudity and sex that cannot be put on broadcast TV--but, as might be expected given the general tendency toward the dark and the "punitive," do so in ways that displeases not only those averse to sex on TV as such (whose numbers are possibly growing, and on both sides of the culture war, with the upmarket prestige TV audience by no means exempt to go by what I see in places like The Guardian), but even that audience up for prurient entertainment. Simply put, in their entertainment that portion of the audience are looking less for "sex" than the "sex-y"; what will appeal to their own, personal, sense of erotic fantasy; what, one may not unfairly say, fits in with their preferred flavor of porn; and are very easily put off when they are shown content not of that particular flavor, content of some else's flavor instead, or perhaps, no one's flavor (even in the mainstream press, some acknowledgment existing of the "joylessness" of the sex in such fare). Seeing the latter can very quickly make them stop watching in disinterest, distaste or even disgust--and in this age of intense "status politics," regard not getting what they want, and having what they do not want inflicted on them, as a provocation or an insult from someone pushing an agenda on them, not always unreasonably since so many are loudly proclaiming such an agenda, with the results (and the inevitable accusation that it is really Russian bots and not actual people expressing the objection) splashed across a thousand Internet fora.

In spite of all that the prestige TV bandwagon rolls on--but, as cable grows more squeamish about funding original content, and even streaming king Netflix grows leerier of auteur-type projects, it seems likely to roll a good deal more slowly as crowd-pleasing fare gets the upper hand. Love or hate it, Disney's sheer crassness has paid off very handsomely in commercial terms--and looking at the commercials for the new Obi-Wan series' I feel sure that this, and not shows like House of the Cards, represents the future of streaming.