The Lights Are on but Nobody’s Home

Everyone is watching TV. No one is watching the same thing.

Discussed: Suits, Succession, Power Book, Game of Thrones, Home Improvement, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Single Guy, fandom

The other day I got an email from Starz, one of the streaming services that seems to be perpetually free for seven days and deeply discounted after.

The message told me to renew my subscription so I wouldn’t miss Power Book IV: Force, a show “from the executive producers of Power.” A new season is upon us and “Tommy Egan is on a mission to avenge Liliana and take over the Chicago drug world. He must decide what he is willing to sacrifice to finally ascend the throne of a kingpin.”

This is surely of interest to the people who watched Force, Power, and Power Book I-III. But how many people is that? Some variation of Power has been on Starz since 2014. Three spinoffs, including Force, are still going. There are 133 episodes of shows set in the Power universe. There are more than twenty-six million subscribers to Starz in the U.S. If just a third of those millions watched the new season, Power Book IV: Force would be as popular as Succession.

So why didn’t I know about PBIV:F? Am I in a cultural bubble? Is everyone ignoring it? Is there just so much to watch that there’s no way to be aware of every option? The answer to all is yes. That’s the way television works now. Streaming is more popular than broadcast and cable, but no single show is nearly as popular as the failures of the old platform. Even among the most popular streaming apps, and for shows that air on television and streaming, the numbers are dismal. A heralded, beloved show like Succession in its final season draws a total audience smaller than that of the average installment of Without a Trace, a late-season Becker, or the episode from the last season of Home Improvement where the Tool Time gang did a tribute to “Greased Lightning.” 

Comparing numbers for shows isn’t entirely fair. It gives streaming an advantage. Viewer numbers for streaming are the sum of day-of viewing on apps and cable, streams in the days after a show debuted, and repeat viewing. The final episodes of Game of Thrones were seen 33 million times, but that number is less impressive when you consider it grew over weeks and some views were people re-watching. Meanwhile, eighteen million people watched an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond at the same time on a random Monday night in 2003. 

In our new age, measuring people is out-of-date. The metric of choice is “viewed minutes,” a unit that sounds technical and precise, but is in fact useless, unless the point is to obscure actual viewership figures. Often, these numbers are reported without enough clarity to know whether sixty viewed minutes means one person watched an hour of a show or twelve people watched five minutes of it. The capability for an exact measurement exists. Every streaming service can determine exactly how many people put on a show and for exactly how long, but this information isn’t made public. As CNBC reports, “the more clarity a company provides about its paying subscribers, the more confident that company is in its streaming performance.” 

Nielson’s measurements indicate that Suits, a legal drama that ran from 2011-2019 on the USA network, is the most popular streaming show this summer. It reached 3.9 billion viewed minutes in the week of July 17, mostly from Netflix. Julia Alexander in Puck writes that Suitsmania is driven by a few factors: a binge-friendly eight seasons landing at once, Netflix’s algorithmic and social media boosts, and the fact that the show stars Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex. How many people are watching it? We don’t know. We just know how long they’re watching it for. 

Watching Suits is what industry writers describe as a lean-back experience; you put it on when you want to watch something and don’t need to be too invested in it. Passive viewing like this isn’t anything new, and still the older numbers beat the new. The Single Guy, a two-season NBC sitcom that debuted in 1995, attracted twenty six million viewers for thirty minutes every week. It accomplished this in large part because the thirty minutes it aired in were between Friends and Seinfeld. People in 1995 were probably just as invested in The Single Guy as viewers are in the seventh episode of Suits that’s on while they’re folding laundry. 

The preponderance of digital distractions isn’t the only reason television has become so fragmented. And the issue isn’t limited to television. Up to this point, when I’ve written that a show was “popular,” I meant it in terms of reach. That’s not what popular means in a world of digital measurement. Viewed minutes is one of many modern metrics that could measure reach or could measure repetition. Another example is the Billboard charts, which are determined primarily by the number of times a song is streamed.

On a business level, new ways of measuring incentivize quantity over quality. As Alexander writes in Puck, Netflix originals like Bridgerton and Black Mirror “are all $100 million-plus attempts at customer acquisition. Series like Suits can be licensed cheaply to keep subscribers engaged with Netflix after the binge-viewing of hot new series is complete.” Original shows are marketing for a subscription to reruns that autoplay while you fall asleep. The callous treatment of writers and actors that we see on display in the current Hollywood strikes offers evidence of how little networks value new ideas and the people who bring them to life. 

Opposite to ambience is obsession, which digital measurement also encourages. One intense fan is worth as much as a few dozen casual ones. This has always been the case to some degree, but when repetition is as valuable as reach, the cultivation of fervent fans becomes a more appealing strategy than trying to reach the broadest audience possible. As Allegra Rosenberg writes in Garbage Day:

…avenues of participation which were at one point oppositional and subcultural are also now pretty much the last way for huge corporations to prop up their corner of the entertainment industry. And it all hinges on us, the audience, having deeply personal, intense relationships with some aspect of mainstream pop culture and not feeling strange about that. In fact, it’s stranger if you don’t.

Intense fandom can be fun, but a close-knit fan community can be inaccessible to outsiders. Devotion can lead to a defensiveness. Already, stars feel the need to tell fans not to threaten people online. 

The audience apocalypse is spreading. Social media is collapsing. Nobody is quite sure what’s happening to podcasts, but it doesn’t seem good. The Hollywood Reporter wrote this summer that, “for the first time in a very, very long time, no broadcast drama or comedy broke the 10-million viewer mark in Nielsen’s season-long ratings.”

“Television has always been good at describing America to itself,” Andrew O’Hagan wrote in The New York Review of Books. “In 1958, the year NASA was founded, seven out of the ten top-rated shows in America were westerns obsessed by the problems of pioneers; by the mid-1980s, when Ronald Reagan was riding high, four of the top ten, led by Dallas and Dynasty, were about feuding wealthy families in shoulder pads.”

So what does our fractured TV world reflect now? We’re in a time of niche entertainment and very specific distraction, of old cable dramas playing while we cook dinner and ASMR videos dulling our anxieties during the workday. Sometimes we seek out something totally forgettable and other times we defend our taste as if it’s our personal dignity. 

TV is saying a lot right now, but it’s saying something different to everyone. You could analyze the viewing patterns of Yellowstone and Succession and draw a conclusion about political polarization. You could puzzle through headlines about Suits and emails about Power Book IV and wonder whether you’re out of touch.You could scroll through the endless streaming offerings and find shows that are baffling, shows that are beguiling, and more than a few blockbusters that seem to not exist at all. It says we’re isolated, exhausted, and more focused on the past than the future.

TV was once a remedy for exhaustion and isolation. The show you unwound with at the end of the day was the show you talked about the next morning in the breakroom. It kept us current and social; TV plugged us into something larger. This is never coming back. Technological leaps made TV more personal, more accessible, and more prevalent. It can never again be a national mirror and a bond between strangers. And what’s worrying is that, with all our technology, we haven’t found anything that can take its place.