All this week, we’re taking a look at the past, present, and future of Peak TV, the current, overabundant TV golden age in which we live.
Peak TV is terrifying in the way that it offers more interesting shows than even the most sleep-deprived human being could watch in a given day, week, month, or year. But it’s also reassuring in that the new normal for television at the moment involves more patience from executives than at any time in the medium’s history. Once upon a time, a show being the lowest-rated in a channel’s history — like, say, AMC’s great Halt and Catch Fire — would get it axed in a hurry; instead, Halt is going to get at least three seasons to tell its story. The audience is spread so thin, and the economics so changed, that any show with even the faintest level of audience passion seems secure for at least a few years.
But Peak TV isn’t a cure-all, and every now and then through this era, we’ve seen some terrific shows end well before they ran out of creative steam, because some numbers are just too low to justify even now. (We’ll see, for that matter, whether Halt gets a fourth season after another ratings drop.) Here are six shows that even Peak TV couldn’t save:
Rubicon (AMC, 2010)
This paranoid thriller about a civilian think tank consulting for U.S. intelligence represented the good and the bad of the Peak TV phenomenon. The good: It was ordered to series despite some clear reservations from the network (which replaced creator Jason Horwitch with the late Henry Bromell after the pilot was completed) because AMC was in a rush to expand the empire that had begun with Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and over 13 episodes it evolved into a mostly riveting drama about the toll this kind of work takes on the people who do it, with great performances from James Badge Dale, Arliss Howard, Michael Cristofer, and others, and atmosphere to spare. The bad: because the show’s plot was impenetrable (culminating in a terrible finale that undermined the show’s commitment to analog intelligence work over people staring at computers), and because there were already so many good drama options out there that weren’t figuring themselves out as they went along, the audience was tiny, and AMC declined to renew it. (Years later, Halt benefited from AMC having an ownership stake, which has changed a lot of the Peak TV calculus, since they can make money selling episodes to Netflix and elsewhere even if the live ratings are terrible.)
Terriers (FX, 2010)
This buddy noir about a pair of lowest-rent private eyes in Ocean Beach is among the greatest shows that nobody watched. Was it that title, which, combined with a poster that de-emphasized stars Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James in favor of a snarling dog, made people think it was a reality show about dog fighting? Was it the fact that the show’s power was all in the execution (particularly the Logue/Raymond-James chemistry), rather than its incredibly familiar character and story types, and thus something not easy to sell to viewers already overwhelmed by higher-concept choices? Whatever the reason, the ratings were so poor that even the Mayor of Television himself, FX boss John Landgraf, couldn’t figure out an excuse to renew it, even though he often references it as a show he wishes he could have saved.
Enlightened (HBO, 2011-13) and Togetherness (HBO, 2015-16)
With no advertisers to answer to, HBO really doesn’t have to care about ratings, and a small show like Girls can have value in attracting subscribers even when it’s not a Game of Thrones-sized phenomenon. Often, HBO’s renewal decisions seem more about awards traction, or something as ephemeral as buzz or what a show says about the brand, but even the latter can’t keep everything alive. Cases in point: Enlightened, a beautiful, if frequently excruciating, series starring Laura Dern (who created it with Mike White) as a flaky executive recovering from a breakdown and coming to grips with the awfulness of the company that employs her; and Togetherness, the Duplass brothers’ intimate half-hour about a quartet of adult friends struggling with relationships, work, and what makes them happy. Both shows ran two acclaimed seasons, but generated little awards currency (save for Dern’s Golden Globe win for Enlightened‘s first season) and didn’t stick around further. In the case of Enlightened, the story had reached a clear stopping point, but the creators of both series insisted they had lots more they wanted to do with each world, and we can only imagine what that would have been.
Manhattan (WGN America, 2014-15)
Or, the perils of being a very good show at a time when it’s too easy to find great ones. This period piece about the men and women who built the atomic bomb was part of WGN’s big push into original scripted drama, but never found much of an audience despite some great performances, haunting photography, and an ever-increasing sense of the despair that comes from realizing you’re creating a weapon of mass destruction. The audience just wasn’t there, even though WGN has had more success with other shows of this wave, at least one of them (Underground) creatively strong in its own right. As with Enlightened, the show ended in a place (the Trinity test in the desert, coupled with the suicide of a major character as a mushroom cloud flowered behind him) that seemed a good thematic summation of what had come before, even though the creator had bigger plans in mind.
The Grinder (FOX, 2015-16)
The protectiveness of the Peak TV phenomenon has largely been confined to cable and streaming, rather than the broadcast networks. But what if it wasn’t? Then we might be enjoying a second season of this hilarious, aggressively meta comedy starring Rob Lowe as a former legal drama star who joins brother Fred Savage’s law practice and attempts — usually successfully — to apply TV logic to the real world. Even in an era where the bar for success has been drastically lowered at the broadcast networks — who depend much more on ratings and advertising revenue than their cable counterparts — this was probably too weird and specific a show to be attempted on one. FOX has a tradition of doing cutting showbiz-adjacent comedies (see also Action! and Greg the Bunny, to name two), and unfortunately also a tradition of failure in that area. But what if they didn’t?
Alan Sepinwall writes about television at HitFix. His latest book is TV (The Book): Two Experts Pick the Greatest TV Series of All Time, co-written with Matt Zoller Seitz.
