On the tram ride home after seeing Megalopolis, I replayed clips of the movie in my head—remembered scenes, bits of dialogue, pieces of a film I was puzzling through. That night, when I looked at my phone, I saw more clips; every social media algorithm I subjected myself to insisted that I watch out-of-context snippets posted by people who may or may not have seen the movie.
Some of the clips celebrated Megalopolis, some made fun of the effects or the costumes. A few weren’t so clear—the caption that accompanied them was an emoji or some glib phrase that seemed designed to hide the poster’s opinion, to give them plausible deniability if someone replied with an actual preference.1 I suspect that a lot of these posters don’t have an opinion on the movie, and based on the poor box office numbers and the reach of posts even on a crumbling platform like Twitter/X, it’s a safe bet to say more people have seen these decontextualized clips than the film itself.
Long before Megalopolis, I’d noticed my Instagram feed was full of clips of old sitcoms. Accounts dedicated to cold opens from Cheers, witty lines from Frasier, and zingers from Fresh Price of Bel-Air drifted into my phone. By tapping one and scrolling, I could zip through the last thirty years of popular television—the Chuck Lorre shows, Modern Family, Must-See TV, Fox’s animation Sundays, Arrested Development, even Married with Children. Each clip has hundreds of likes and slews of comments, a testament less to their quality (though some of them are pretty good) and more to the posters’ clever algorithm gaming. Put these clips in front of people, and they’ll watch. In this, the algorithm functions like a budget-conscious TV executive from the broadcast era. Need something to fill a timeslot but don’t want to pay the cast and crew full rate? Throw on a clip show.
Clip shows were an unpleasant necessity in the broadcast and cable years. They filled episode orders, kept budgets in line, and served as introductions for new viewers. As a kid, I dreaded clip shows. They always started promisingly, with the characters setting off on some new adventure, but within a couple minutes, the core cast was sitting still and saying “remember that time?” as a way to introduce highlights from the last couple seasons. At least a rerun had a complete story.
The clip show was too cheesy a premise for prestige TV, and the jobs it does aren’t needed on-demand. But while it may not be present in new shows on streaming apps, it is everywhere else online. Beyond the sitcom clips and movie memes, everything from current events to documentation of personal experiences gets chopped into short pieces and served up without context. Even clips that begin their life as clips end up as shorter clips, through stitching and reaction videos. Last time I was at a gas station in the U.S., TVs at the pump and inside the store showed trimmed-down montages of viral videos. It’s 1984 meets America’s Funniest Home Videos.
I realize that hand-wringing about the reduction of art and entertainment into bite-sized pieces predates most of the shows I see chopped up on my Instagram feed. Neil Postman warned about sound-bite culture in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death. What I find frustrating about the clip era we’re in now isn’t that people prefer short snippets, it’s that short snippets are becoming the only media on offer. Megalopolis, famously, was financed by Francis Ford Coppola himself, and a distribution deal almost never happened. Film distributors won’t take a chance with a two-hour movie, but a giant portion of the internet economy is built on thirty second clips of that movie. Megalopolis will be out of theaters while people are still joking over Adam Driver saying “go back to the club.” I’m writing this less than twelve hours after a vice presidential debate, which was 90-minutes on television but is now everywhere presented as “five key moments,” each chopped and clipped and thrown in front of me. (Was there a sixth key moment? I may never know.) A lot of well-paid political consultants hatched complicated strategies to create these key moments, which news outlets seized on to draw clicks. Pundits, both professional and amateur, will talk over these key moments until the next set of key moments comes along. The clips keep changing, but the conclusions will stay the same.
Something similar is happening in TV. New shows and movies strive for meme-able moments—juxtapositions of captions and actors’ faces that can be recycled to build buzz, like the “bad tweet” chant in Succession or “I never jest about cake” line in Game of Thrones. When series do this, they reverse the old clip show formula—instead of pushing a season’s worth of ideas into a single episode, they build entire seasons to flesh out what is truly only an episode’s worth of ideas.
Inspired by all these clips, I went back and watched a handful of episodes of classic sitcoms—Cheers, Seinfeld, Frasier, Fresh Prince. It’s striking how dense the shows are compared to television today; every scene is packed with jokes, character development, plot movement. Thirty-year-old shows feel zippy, complex, and clever compared to plodding, dreary streaming originals. The newest medium is now the most boring. Two of the most interesting and acclaimed new shows in recent years—Abbott Elementary and The English Teacher—are built for the supposedly-defunct linear TV world; Abbott airs on ABC and English Teacher on FX. But these are two shows in a sea of new releases that come and go. If someone were to watch the last three decades of television in chronological order, they’d get the sense that the medium is running out of things to say.
It’s tempting to imagine that the business proposition will flip, and networks will wonder why they don’t just make everything a clip. But Quibi failed. More likely, networks will wonder why they should make new shows at all. My feed is full of old sitcoms, and so too, are streaming services. The Office, Suits, and Friends remain hugely popular in both their original format and as out-of-context highlights. Clip shows began as a way to avoid replaying an old episode, but now clip show culture has turned so much of online life into a rerun.
For the record, I think it was great.
The other reason why network and cable TV declined was because the networks insisted on ownership control, either directly through their studios or through the ones they are corporately affiliated with. "Prestige" TV is largely a result of insurgent streamers teaming up with the linear TV makers who refused to play ball with the gangsters running the mainstream organization.