When we started looking at the bigger television ecosystem, you see that there's not that many serialized TV shows being made for TV. The economics are lousy: They don't sell into syndication well; they're expensive to produce.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There are certain economics involved in making a network TV show that you want to amortize the costs of that, so the more episodes you make, the cheaper they all are individually.
Television is better than it's ever been in history. A lot of stories are being pushed - because of how complicated they are to make - toward Netflix and other channels on cable.
There are moments when television systems are young and haven't formed properly, and there's room for lots of original stuff. Then things become more and more top-heavy with executives who are trying to guarantee the success of things.
Sometimes good television doesn't depend on money, it depends on imagination and good people directing, casting and doing the job with talented people.
TV producers want ratings and are willing to do nearly anything to get them. They gin up artificial conflicts and create an urgency for even the most minor of economic data points.
There's not a lot of really great, deep, serialized television, and we can see from the data that that's what people want.
Television offers a range and scope, and a degree of creativity and daring, that the bottom-line, global-audience-obsessed, brand-driven movie industry just can't compete with.
I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex. The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated.
Cable television stations in America are now producing such smart, in-depth, non-formula, character-based dramas. Film has turned more and more into big action or cartoons.
Television is really fertile ground, and it's because of platforms like Netflix and Hulu and, of course, the cable channels like HBO and Showtime.