A Slow-Motion Eulogy for the TV Industry

The mini-revival of TV’s pilot season this year has been an unexpected surprise — and also a bittersweet one.

NBC has ordered eight pilots in the past two months, more than double the number of pilots it picked up last year — and more than the total of seven across all broadcast nets during the 2025 development cycle. ABC and CBS have two pilots each, bringing the total to 12.

But the wider lens is more bleak: In 2019, networks ordered 66 pilots, which at that time was the fewest in at least seven years. Since then, a number of factors — a switch to other development models in search of more efficiency, COVID, and aftereffects of the 2023 strikes among them — combined to push the number of network pilots down each year to a low of just five in 2024. Fox and The CW have all but abandoned pilots in favor of script-to-series or straight-to-series pickups, while other networks have leaned on those models along with development writers rooms.

The mini-revival of pilot season represents a small beam of optimism for TV as we used to know it. There are chances for writers, actors and crew members to secure work for at least a little while, and that executives are rediscovering that some supposedly outmoded ways of making television can still be good, actually. There’s also a heavy dose of nostalgia involved. The old model of network pilot season was terribly inefficient from a business standpoint. Ordering hundreds of scripts that turned into dozens of pilots, all cast and filmed in a frenzied three- to four-month window, out of which maybe 20 or so series would result, was not a way to mind the bottom line. But it was also exciting.

Soundstages in Los Angeles would be busy, thousands of people would be working in those few months early in the year, producing shows that ranged from all-time classics to all-time blunders. Even though most of them never made it onto a schedule, a noble failure or poorly testing high concept could stick in a network executive or showrunner’s mind, and from that an actor or writer or crew member might find work on a show that did make it through the process.

That kind of excitement is in much shorter supply now. In fact, as a reporter covering the industry, the past couple of years have increasingly felt like I’m writing a slow-moving, multi-part obituary for television as most of us knew it. The television that involves real sets being built, fully staffed writers rooms, series regulars, dozens of recurring and guest roles, attention spent on production value handled by below-the-line pros and an audience of millions of viewers who regularly tune in on a weekly basis.

Material for that obit has been rolling in of late. First came CBS’ “financial decision” last summer to cancel The Late Show — ending not just Stephen Colbert’s 11-season run as host but the entire 33-year franchise started by David Letterman. (Though given that the FCC approved Paramount’s merger with Skydance shortly afterward, finances were almost certainly a factor — just not in the way the new ownership team spun the decision. “How many of you watch late-night on any network today? Raise your hand,” Paramount’s new COO Andy Gordon dared reporters the week the Skydance team arrived last August.)

Earlier this month, the producers of Kelly Clarkson’s and Sherri Shepherd’s daytime talk shows said they would end after this season, leaving only a handful of such shows still kicking. Daytime and late night, for sure, have been withering faster than other aspects of the traditional TV business. But it wasn’t that long ago that daytime syndication appeared to be on the upswing.

The Kelly Clarkson Show was one of seven new syndicated shows that premiered in the fall of 2019 in what was the biggest year for new launches since Oprah Winfrey left the daytime stage in 2011. Sherri arose in 2022 after Shepherd ably filled in for Wendy Williams at the end of that show’s run. Both shows performed reasonably well for much of their time on air, but Clarkson’s show now averages about 1.2 million viewers per day, and Shepherd’s is usually under a million — numbers that make the economics of a fully produced daytime show hard to square.

What will replace the Clarkson and Shepherd shows, and Late Night, remains to be seen. If the local stations that will be buying programs to fill those hours follow the current trend, though, it could well be a video podcast. Netflix, Hulu and Fox’s free streamer Tubi have all cut deals to feature such shows recently, hoping to keep pace with (or maybe siphon some viewers from) YouTube, which is the most watched TV platform in part on the back of podcasts that put a camera in their studios. They’re also much cheaper, not usually employing unionized crews, and operate with a fraction of the staff of a traditional talk show.

They’re also not really meant to be watched, in the sense that a viewer will be looking at the screen while it plays. They’re meant to be on, driving up time spent — or “engagement” — in the most passive way possible, half-heard while scrolling through social media or doing something around the house. Meanwhile, free streamers and FAST channels, including the Roku Channel, Tubi and Pluto TV, have carved sizable niches in the marketplace with a user experience that mimics the channel surfing of 15 or 20 years ago, without a cable or satellite subscription. It’s working: Roku Channel, Tubi and Pluto combine for about 6 percent of all TV use in the United States, most of that built on libraries of older shows (though Roku and Tubi have some original programming too).

All of the above makes me sound like a Luddite, which is far from the case. If someone asks me what streaming services I and my family have, my answer is “most of them,” ranging from Netflix to AMC+ to Kanopy. Outside of sports, I rarely watch live commercial TV. Like millions of other viewers, I changed my habits when streaming became a viable option to watch the things I like. I am part of the problem.

But in an industry that previously at least paid lip service to balancing commerce and art, it’s starting to feel like commerce has a thumb, every other finger and both feet on the scale.

The upending of the business brought about by the streaming era created an arms race in which media conglomerates threw billions of dollars into streaming platforms in a race to compete with Netflix, fueling the latter stages of the Peak TV boom with a flood of shows and rich deals for creators and A-list stars. In one sense, it was a success. No one has yet built a platform with the scale and volume of original shows and movies that Netflix has, but streaming has become the default option for most viewers.

But in that scale-over-everything moment, a lot of things that worked pretty well got tossed aside as outdated thinking. Things like seasons of more than eight or 10 episodes, having writers on set to help produce an episode they wrote, and releasing shows on a reliable schedule — things that made life workable for the industry’s middle class, the craftspeople and working actors and mid-level writers.

Now that streaming has fully established itself as the go-to — it accounts for almost half of all TV use in the United States — streamers have started to act like more broadcasters. That means some of the oddball stuff that had a moment toward the end of the Peak TV boom is falling away, sadly — no one’s greenlighting something as off kilter as The OA or Servant these days. On the positive side, though, platforms are re-learning that regularly produced seasons (some even approaching broadcast season length) are good business, and having writers on set — as now contractually obligated in the current WGA agreement — can help train the next crop of showrunners.

Between the rush of the scaling-up period of the early streaming years and the post-Peak TV contraction, though, some other aspects of the business were irretrievably broken. Outside of news and sports programs, fewer than 10 cable shows draw more than a million viewers for their initial airings in a given week. Broadcast networks have fewer hours of scripted programming than they have in ages, even as the libraries of their long-running shows consistently bring big viewing numbers to streaming services.

Then there’s the matter of one of the most storied movie and TV studios, Warner Bros., about to be absorbed by either the biggest streamer in the world, Netflix, or one of its historic competitors, Paramount. Mergers tend not to end well for rank and file employees, and WB’s merger history is especially fraught (see: Time, AOL, AT&T), Whatever the end result, it will further alter an industry already unmoored from a long run of relative stability. The rapid encroachment of AI, which can produce a fake but photorealistic Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting on a rooftop (for a few seconds at least, while also not explaining anything about how or why they got there), also threatens to cut humans out of the production process almost entirely.