Origins and early era French scholar Alexis Pichard has argued that television enjoyed a Second Golden Age starting in the 2000s which was a combination of three elements: first, an improvement in both visual aesthetics and storytelling; second, an overall homogeneity between cable series and networks series; and third, a tremendous popular success. Pichard contends that this Second Golden Age was the result of a revolution initiated by the traditional networks in the 1980s and carried on by the
cable channels (especially
HBO) in the 1990s. Film director
Francis Ford Coppola thinks that the second golden age of television comes from "kids" with their "little father's camcorder", who wanted to make films like he did in the 1970s but were not permitted to, so they did it for television. The new Golden Age arose after a short-lived "dark age" that had emerged in the late 1990s in which "
low culture took over the world" with increasingly vulgar content, including
tabloid talk shows and comedies such as
South Park. This broad category also included some of the earliest Golden Age shows, which broke down previous boundaries that had prohibited vulgar content, but did so in more tasetful ways. '' reunite at a
San Diego Comic-Con panel. Left to right:
Alan Tudyk,
Tim Minear,
Sean Maher,
Summer Glau,
Joss Whedon,
Nathan Fillion,
Adam Baldwin,
Jose Molina. The new Golden Age brought creator-driven tragic anti-heroic dramas of the 2000s and 2010s, including: • 1998's
Sex and the City • 1999's
The Sopranos (named the greatest TV show of all time by
TV Guide and
Rolling Stone) and
The West Wing • 2001's
Six Feet Under and 24 • 2002's
The Wire (
voted as the greatest TV show of the 21st Century by BBC in 2021) and
The Shield • 2004's
Deadwood,
Lost and
Battlestar Galactica • 2005's ''
Grey's Anatomy and Avatar: The Last Airbender'' • 2006's
Friday Night Lights and
Dexter • 2007's
Mad Men • 2008's
Breaking Bad • 2010's
The Walking Dead • 2011's
Game of Thrones • 2013's
House of Cards and
Orange Is the New Black • 2014's
True Detective • 2015's
Better Call Saul • 2016's
The Crown • 2018's
Succession Others appear in the
Writers Guild of America 2013 vote for 101 Best-Written TV Shows. Production values got higher than ever before on shows such as
Band of Brothers,
Mad Men,
Breaking Bad, and
Homeland to the point of rivaling cinema, while anti-heroic series like
The Sopranos and
The Wire were cited as improving television content thus earning critical praise. Stephanie Zacharek of
The Village Voice has argued that the current golden age began earlier with over-the-air broadcast shows like
Babylon 5,
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (both of which premiered in 1993), and
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997). TV critic Alan Sepinwall cites shows such as
Buffy and
Oz (which both first aired in 1997) as ushering in the golden age.
Will Gompertz of the
BBC believes that
Friends, which debuted in 1994, might stake a claim as the opening bookend show of the period. With the rise of instant access to content on
Netflix, creator-driven television shows like
Breaking Bad,
The Shield (2002),
Friday Night Lights (2006) and
Mad Men gained loyal followings that grew to become widely popular. The success of instant access to television shows was presaged by the popularity of DVDs, and continues to increase with the rise of digital platforms and online companies. The Golden Age of television is believed to have resulted from advances in media distribution technology,
Late era and end , Supernatural, and The Vampire Diaries'' An increasing reliance on
rebooting and
reviving existing
franchises led to widespread belief that the Golden Age of Television was ending in the late 2010s, with the caveat that some of these reboots (such as
DuckTales,
Girl Meets World, One Day at a Time, ''
X-Men '97, and Shōgun By 2024, Netflix had also begun splitting its seasons of new content to limit binge-watching, fearing that it was contributing to a phenomenon where viewers would subscribe for a short period to binge-watch their favorite show only to cancel their subscription when finished. The conclusion of its tentpole series Stranger Things'' in 2025 marked the "end of an era" for Netflix, as one-season
limited-run series and foreign imports had by then constituted the bulk of its original content.
Quantity over quality Ed Power of the
Irish Examiner opined that "the sun began to set" on the golden age between 2013 and 2015, with the finales of
Breaking Bad and
Mad Men, and "Since then, television has reverted to its older tradition of quantity over quality." A May 2023 essay in ''
Harper's Bazaar declared the era of the time to be the "Age of Mid Television," noting that mediocre programs were gaining popularity due to the escapism they provide in an age where the real world brings greater anxiety. Vulture expressed similar views in June 2023, speaking of Peak TV in the past tense and noting that the more artistic shows that marked the Golden Age of highbrow programming were also expensive and made small or no profits, even if they drew new subscribers. The New Yorker'' concurred in November of the same year, declaring the Golden Age to be over after a
regression toward the mean; based upon several books on the topic, the article essentially argued that the same dynamics that drove the death of earlier Golden Ages in media (such as television's first Golden Age and the
New Hollywood of the early 1970s) were also affecting the early 21st-century Golden Age of Television, namely that the technology innovations that had allowed highbrow programs to flourish were being capitalized upon by more profitable
franchise products able to crowd out riskier projects for attention from financial backers.
Streaming wars and aftermath Around 2019, a period of intense competition began for market share among streaming services, a period known as the
streaming wars. This competition increased during the first two years of the
COVID-19 pandemic as more people stayed home and watched television. Many services attempted to compete on quality. The streaming wars, combined with the decline of the popularity of mainstream films (along with said films increasingly relying on
franchises that are less likely to garner awards), and the rise of
independent films winning major film awards within the last six years, resulted in a historical first—the first film from a streaming service to win the
Academy Award for Best Picture:
Apple TV's
CODA over
Netflix's
The Power of the Dog at the
94th Academy Awards. The streaming wars were largely recognized to have ended in 2022, as the major streaming services lost subscribers and shifted their focus to profit over market share by raising subscription fees, cutting production budgets, cracking down on password sharing, and introducing ad-supported tiers.
HBO Max made a substantial cut to its library in August 2022, mostly to its
children's television series, out of concerns that the quantity of content on the service (especially with its pending merger with
Discovery+) was becoming overwhelming and difficult to find, and that the children's programming was not driving subscriptions or views on the service. By the summer of 2023, other major streaming providers had begun to remove short-lived series from their catalogues and make them unavailable afterwards, something that had previously been a rare occurrence; this was particularly true of Disney+ (Disney had historically followed a similar model with physical media, known as the
Disney Vault, which it had initially suspended in the early months of Disney+) and
Paramount+. This also coincided with an increased emphasis on business models that draw revenue from both advertising and subscriptions, prompting streaming providers to focus on productions that have mass appeal while also reducing investment in high-risk projects targeting niche audiences. The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath saw major reductions in the workforce and cancellations of multiple productions to save money on basic residuals and music licensing costs, which led to a worsening condition for writers and actors, setting the stage for the
2023 Hollywood labor disputes. This led to fewer shows ordered by studios and streamers as the WGA strike ended In a January 2024 story titled "Peak TV Is Over",
The Hollywood Reporter said that the number of ordered television series' seasons in the United States decreased from 633 in 2022 and 2021 to 481 in 2023, and that the number was not likely to increase in 2024.
Rerun boom and the fall of cable Viewership patterns during the pandemic shifted rapidly toward
reruns, A 2021 interview of social media influencers noted that the
teen sitcoms and
teen dramas from the early Golden Age, driven by continued presence in reruns and video-on-demand platforms, have stronger followings among
Generation Z than contemporary shows; they feel that the latter are more geared toward pre-teens or adults instead of teenagers, try too hard to appeal to current trends, and lack a sense of familiarity compared to shows that have been around since they were born. This is attributed as a cause for the increasing number of reboots and revivals of shows from early in the era.
Suits was the most-streamed TV show of 2023, This has coincided with an even more dramatic decline in viewership, with general-interest cable networks and several of the more established niche networks losing over half of their viewing audiences in the same period; David Bauder of the Associated Press noted that the corresponding declines in viewership and original programming were triggering a
vicious cycle, and that by the mid-2020s, cable television had lost its ability to create "appointment television" events, instead relying on "ghost" programming such as low-quality, low-cost reality fare and reruns. By 2024, only three cable series –
Yellowstone,
Hallmark Channel's original series
When Calls the Heart and
The Way Home — averaged more than 1.5 million viewers. The streaming wars were also a factor in a shift toward
free advertising supported television initiatives (FAST) in the early 2020s. FAST services typically rely on archival programming for the majority of their content, allowing the services to operate for free to the end user while splitting advertising revenue with the program owners (or profiting directly if the program and FAST service are
owned by the same company).
Tubi, the advertising-supported video on demand service owned by
Fox Corporation, acquired the streaming rights to much of the content that HBO Max had jettisoned in 2023.
Pluto TV relies on the extensive archival libraries of Paramount and its numerous acquisitions. ==Characteristics==