Is the Reason Streaming Shows Don't Make it into the "Zeitgeist" That Nothing Does?

Quentin Tarantino recently remarked that streaming content fails to make it into the "zeitgeist."

I don't think he's wrong about that.

But that still leaves the question of why that is the case.

My first thought was that it is because there are so many streaming services dividing up the market between them. But some streaming services really are used by really large proportions of the country. We are told that 62 percent of American households subscribe to Netflix. A significant majority of the country, that is a bigger subscriber base than HBO has--which has so often seen its shows acquire "zeitgeist" status, as revealed not just by older hits like The Sopranos and Sex and the City and Band of Brothers and Game of Thrones.

But then the newest of those shows, Thrones, made its debut over a decade ago--even before Netflix got heavily into the production of original content, whereas more recent shows have had less traction that way. We are endlessly told by entertainment writers euphoric over Euphoria the way they sang The Sopranos that it draws massive audiences--but does it really have that kind of zeitgeist status? They say that it does, but it seems to me that whereas I remember getting positively sick of hearing about HBO hits of the past wherever I turned it seems that, apart from the entertainment press' ravings about these things, I can forget that it exists at all in a way that seemed impossible with talk about THE SOPRANOS THE SOPRANOS THE SOPRANOS THE SOPRANOS blaring at us from every direction all day.

That being the case the issue seems something else--not that streaming services are chopping up the market so that very few people are watching any one thing, but that even when a lot of them are watching something the rest of us are able to ignore the fact as we go about our lives, pop culture too crowded and fragmented for any really recent thing, even when successful, to impose itself on our attention in the same way.

At least, when we get older and stop pretending that we care about following this stuff along anymore so that we no longer need go very far out of our way.